Malware leads Minnesota school district to close for 1 day | Hacker News Reader

Malware leads Minnesota school district to close for 1 day

startribune.com

46 pointsprostoalex29 comments

This is really disappointing and feels like a regression. We've managed to teach and learn for centuries without any computers, and now problems with them can cause schools to close? I've taught programming courses without needing to refer to a computer.

So to give tech support staff a chance to start rebuilding the system, they closed all five schools in the district on Thursday.

"Tech support staff", so presumably the teachers didn't need to be involved at all.

I'll refrain from further ranting on how {black,white}boards, dead-tree books, and writing instruments were all we needed when I was still in school.

Maybe the district just had a furlough day to use?

CLOQUET, Minn. — Officials are still repairing boilers in the Cloquet (klo-KAY') school district in northeastern Minnesota after a boiler explosion rendered the school without heat and was severe enough to close schools for one day.

"When I was in school all we needed was a wood stove. We've managed to teach and learn for centuries without boilers," grumbled one grumpy commenter. "I've taught HVAC courses without needing a boiler!

Incidentally, I do remember the heating system being out on a few days in my years of schooling. We just kept wearing our jackets.

A boiler explosion, however, may cause a lot of extra damage, and if many classrooms are affected then it does make sense to close for a day.

Then again I'm not in the US so it may just be a different attitude toward these things. The phrase "Keep calm and carry on" comes to mind...

In my middle- and high-school education, I found that the teachers who relied most upon technological gadgetry (smartboards, mandatory use of "essential" software, online homework + quizzes, etc.) were uniformly the worst teachers.

Note: that's not necessarily strictly because of their (mistaken) reliance on gadgetry. Those teachers were generally young and inexperienced.

Computers and teaching go together like labor saving machinery and exercise. If you want to get strong, you have to work, and labor saving machinery will do the work for you, but you won't get stronger.

Same for computers.

Tell that to the bicycle.

I think the real problem is that we're putting people who should never be allowed near a computer, in front of a computer. I just can't understand the thought processes of anyone who lets their computer get infected by malware -- it's something they actually have to cause themselves.

If I had to guess it wasn't really necessary from a teaching standpoint but they decided it was easier since nowadays they manage the entire school on their school information system. Attendance, lunch room balances, etc. are all routed through the systems nowadays and trying to do it all by paper and then re-entering it the next day would have been a huge PITA.

This is yet another reason for schools to switch to mostly Chromebooks. Pretty much impossible to get malware spreading on those things.

Schools around where I lived when I grew up did this:

A certain amount of snow days were budgeted in the schedule. Once spring hit if we had extra snow days we didn't use for snow they would use them up so we'd just have a random couple of days off in the spring.

It's likely they felt comfortable using a "snow day" if they had a few extra.

Chromebooks protect you against some categories of malware, but they also add a dependency on the internet and giving Google tracking data. While it is hard to quantify these costs, they do exist and should be considered. In particular, requiring the internet is a huge risk which may require even more shutdowns in the future if the internet ever goes down.

The SIS systems are almost all hosted these days so it's the same risk from an Internet requirement. Google doesn't track usage on students use of Chromebooks.

> This is really disappointing and feels like a regression. We've managed to teach and learn for centuries without any computers, and now problems with them can cause schools to close? I've taught programming courses without needing to refer to a computer.

Humans also managed to live for centuries without electricity, cars, aeroplanes or ships, but take those away and the world would fall to shit pretty quickly. It's all about what you've adapted to and your daily routine. Sure, we could do without those things, but you couldn't transition to that overnight.

> cars, aeroplanes or ships

While I agree that transportation is another technology trap, most of it is reasonably independent; one broken car usually doesn't prevent a large number of other cars from working. Also, education doesn't depend on transportation directly most of the time.

> electricity

I remember quite a few days where the teacher was able to continue the lesson after a power outage. They had the benefit of a classroom with enough windows that we could still see mostly see the blackboard, so this isn't always possible. Education is therefore situationally dependent on electricity and can often continue when it isn't available.

Unlike electricity, a computer is a far more complex tool. Depending on computers implies being the target of sentient attackers in addition to the incredible complexity of "ordinary" bugs.

If the computer also requires depending on the internet, the risk that it will eventually fail is very close to 1. Many institut8ions have exchanged their older workflows that could work independently with implementations that depend on the internet. Eventually they will receive a harsh lesson about limiting complexity and minimizing external dependencies.

>education doesn't depend on transportation

Then why are schools closed on snow days?

> Then why are schools closed on snow days?

I would imagine not in Minnesota? I think this is measure to limit traffic in places where snow is rare occurance and causes a spike in accidents.

You don't have to use your imagination; you have access to the internet. Places with lots of snow every year do close schools.

http://www.mprnews.org/story/2015/01/06/school-closure-crite...

Nah. From the Midwest and we had a super warm winter. Mostly no snow. First day of 4 inches of snow? Schools closed and 100 car accidents. People forget how to drive in snow.

Very false.

I'm from an area with tons of snow. As I mentioned before we not only got snow days, they were budgeted into the schedule.

Ok, I misunderstood snow days to mean generally snowy days. I am from north and we have snow many months of the year. I thought if snowy day causes school to shut down it must be in a place where it doesn't snow this often. If snow day means day when school is shut down due to extreme weather it makes sense there are those especially in places with bad wearher. I wish we would have had them here when I was in school.

Sometimes it just takes long enough to clear the roads that you can't get kids to school on time (or back home on time). They try really hard not to cancel -- I remember as a kid being in a bus that slid backwards down a hill because it just couldn't get the traction. Being a successful northerner involves knowing when to hold and when to fold :)

> > directly

Teaching doesn't depend directly on transportation, but you probably use transportation infrastructure to gain access to it.

Almost every aspect of modern civilization has indirect dependencies on infrastructure such as transportation. As James Burke explains in the first episode of "Connections", we've been living in a technology trap ever since the plow was invented.

However, most of these traps are indirect. The slack in the system converts a lot of total system failures into mere inconveniences. In the case of snow days, it's easy to plan to have a few unscheduled days off. It's a lot harder to plan for infrastructure failures when you depend on it directly.

This incident was treated as a crime, which is progress as up until recently the attitude would be to roll back to a known good backup and keep going, albeit with some recent data lost. The idea of getting the FBI or police involved would not be thinkable, plus they would not take the incident seriously as a 'crime'. So in that way there is progress with this story.

Once this route has been taken it is a simple matter of closing down the system and suspending all the schools until things are fixed. There probably was a realisation at this stage that they no longer had means of taking a paper based register or students familiar with how that works.

Does anyone have any guesses as to what the software is like? Is it one of those Visual Basic things rather than a modern web interface?

Not exactly the circumstances I'd like to see my state hit HN with... My guess: school districts up north have some extra days built into the semester (usually for closings due to snow storms) and they figured it would be less stressful for everyone to close for a day while they sort things out.

I hate articles with no details. It would instructive to know what type of malware, what OS versions, what server infrastructure, etc so that others might be forewarned. Of course I realize it's probably Windows XP without patches but it would still be nice to know.

This happened last week to my girlfriends brothers schoo, we are in the UK. Ransomware attack that encrypted their NFS shares. They did not close however. I think they may have had to pay the ransom.

Medical organizations have downtime procedures when centralized technology isn't functioning in production. In general, things move to more of a peer to peer set of procedures, manual intermediary record keeping, and procedures to synchronize the system to the actions during downtime.

Education interruptions, especially in public schools, don't have the same magnitude for needing documented resilience, but surely some people should be able to just wing it in the class rooms.

Or do social time / pre adult day care like how half my public school hours seemed to be.

It's extremely unlikely computer use is actually required to teach in the classroom. The malware attacked the district's servers. The ability to administrator was likely what was effected since servers can control things like door locks, bells, alarms, heating, and access to student databases.

The bright spot, Scarbrough says, is no personal student or staff data or financial information is at risk.

They have lax enough security to allow malware to shut them down for a day, they have unknown programs running amok in their network, yet, somehow, they are confident that no personal or financial information is at risk?

Next week's headline: Hackers demand ransom, threaten to post Minnesota School district's student and financial info online.

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