MUSD recovering from communications hack

It’s not unusual for a large corporation to experience technical difficulties, but the communication issues at Maricopa Unified School District this week had a dark source.

“We noticed extreme spikes of data usage and pockets of data being dropped onto our network with traffic that was not supposed to be there,” district spokesperson Mishell Terry said.

Schools reported intermittent phone and Internet outages, and the tech department monitored network traffic to find the hack. The intrusion affected communications district-wide.

By Thursday, the Internet was running again but the district was still troubleshooting issues with the phones.

“CenturyLink teamed with our technology crew to make network changes in order to block the attack,” Terry said. “There are still some glitches in our phone lines due to the changes to our network.”

The source of the hack?

“We haven’t identified the software used for the attack.”