Ontario Secondary School Teachers Union Notifies Victims of Ransomware Attack

Some current and retired public high school teachers and related staff in Ontario were notified last spring that their personal information had been copied by hackers as part of a ransomware attack on their union’s IT systems.

The Ontario Federation of Secondary School Teachers (OSSTF) said Wednesday that it became aware that an unauthorized third party had accessed and encrypted some of the union’s systems on May 30. The system was compromised about 5 days ago.

Members were quietly informed of the attack at the time. Affected members are now said to have had their data stolen.

Federation Media and Communications Advisor Caitlin Reed didn’t immediately know IT World Canada How many members have been notified and how many IT systems have been encrypted by attackers.

“There has been no significant impact” on federal operations, she added.

“We immediately hired a forensic company to contain and investigate the incident. We have now notified our members of the incident and an investigation is ongoing.”

When asked why it took six months to notify members, Reed said he had to complete an eDiscovery process to verify potentially affected personal information. It took months to complete. “As soon as that process was completed, we reached out to members.”

The OSSTF has over 60,000 members throughout Ontario, including public high school teachers, part-time teachers, educational assistants, continuing education teachers and instructors, early childhood educators, psychologists, secretaries, speech-language pathologists, and social workers. , plant support personnel, university support staff, and many others in education.

In a statement, the union said there is no evidence at this time that a member’s personal data has been misused, but that Equifax has credit monitoring and personal It states that it offers information theft prevention services. Cost of OSSTF, 1 year.