April 6, 2021
MUSD Families,
The following is an update regarding the District's technology, as well as important information for your student as we continue to resolve an issue that began last week.
As we began bringing each of our servers back online following Thursday's power outage, our Information Technology Department noticed some anomalies within the District's network. For precautionary reasons, and in order to best protect the District against a breach of information, the IT team immediately shut down the network, impacting our internet accessibility, Outlook mail system, and phone systems.
Through the weekend, working with a third-party IT partner, the District's IT team began restoring as much of the network as possible while investigating the cause of the issue. It has been determined that some of the District's servers were impacted with information and programs being encrypted and deleted in some cases. At this point, we have not found any of our databases or data to have been breached.
While we are working diligently to resolve and restore network access and security, this event has been a disruption for our teachers, students and families. Therefore, we have important updates for you:
- Educators across the District are providing robust, non-tech-centered instruction for all in-person students.
- All standardized tests for this week will not take place and will be rescheduled in the coming weeks. Watch for updates from impacted schools.
- This is impacting our remote learners, and in particular remote students who are participating in synchronous classes. Please have your student check-in with teachers via Gmail and check Google Classroom.
- Some incoming and outgoing District emails (via @maranausd.org) following April 1 may be lost.
- Phone service is intermittent. If you are unable to reach your child's school by phone, we encourage you to connect with your school principal for any administrative issue using Gmail. Secretaries should also be contacted via Gmail for any logistics, attendance or general inquiries. See the attached PDF for contact information.
At this point, we do not have an anticipated timeline for resolving this issue, though we are hopeful systems will begin to be turned on later this week. Until then, we have been advised to keep all systems off while we restore security, rebuild any necessary programs, and put additional security protocols in place.
Maintaining secure data is imperative for any District, and our IT department had several processes in place that limited exposure to our data and programs. The silver lining to this event is the damage is not permanent and we have access to several back-up servers which will help expedite restoring network security. We thank our IT department who has tirelessly worked around the clock to minimize the impact on our staff and families.
We thank you for your patience as we navigate this situation, and we will continue to communicate as we have updates and make progress in resolving this issue.
- Marana Unified School District Administration
messages/attachments/5ad7470885cfe5b59d9cd78e134e9860/MUSD_Gmail_Email_Contacts.pdf (45.7 KB)
