Home » Hacker attack against Axios, electronic school registers haywire

Hacker attack against Axios, electronic school registers haywire

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Do you have homework for the Easter holidays? ”. “No”. “Of course? It seems impossible to me: check the electronic register ”. “Go ahead”…

Similar dialogues were most likely staged in the homes of thousands of Italian families, precisely on the eve of the suspension of lessons for the holidays, and many parents were certainly surprised to verify that their children did not actually have any tasks to do. Nothing, of no matter. Nothing, at least, if the school attended uses the digital services of Axios, one of the main platforms of this kind active in Italy.

From the morning of last April 3, that is precisely from the eve of Easter, according to what we read on axiositalia.it, the company’s servers are inaccessible: initially there was talk of “a sudden technical malfunction that occurred during the night” for which ” an extraordinary maintenance intervention was necessary ”, but with the passing of the hours the situation became more serious. And more complex. In two different messages, published at the end of the morning and at the end of the afternoon of 5 April, Axios Italia informed before the prolongation of the inefficiencies and then also that “following the in-depth technical checks we had confirmation that the inefficiency is unequivocally a consequence of a ransomware attack brought to our infrastructure “.

Simplifying, ransomware is one of the most common among cyber attacks: it consists in blocking all or part of access to a device (or multiple devices) and asking for the payment of a “ransom” (ransom, in English) to allow the owner to repossess it.

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Axios: “No data was stolen”
There is still no confirmation that this really happened to the Axios Italia servers and whether a ransom was paid or not: what is certain is that at the time of writing the problem has not yet been solved (at 8, on axiositalia .it read that “we are completing the infrastructure restoration activities and the tests for security checks”) and probably will not be for another 24 hours; the company has nevertheless made it known that “from the investigations carried out, at the moment there are no data leaks and / or exfiltrations”. In short, sensitive information on students, their grades and their families would not have been stolen.

Axios provides the service to more or less 40% of Italian schools and the inconvenience would affect over 5.5 million students.

From our checks, the problem does not seem to affect the servers of the other major provider of distance learning services, which is called ClasseViva, and obviously not even Classroom, the Google platform dedicated to schools (which is part of the offer of Big G dedicated to kids). But no one tell him, to the parents of those kids who “no, I have no homework to do for the next few days”.

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