Picture taken by our photographer Truman Swartzfager in room.123 for the Central Tribune
It was just another Wednesday on the calendar, the first week of the fresh start to a new quarter. There was no school on Monday that week, as if it wasn't odd enough. I walked into class late by about fourteen minutes at least. Within whispers throughout the class I got hints of some attack on someone's internet? Whoever's internet was breached must be under a lot of stress I thought, come to find out those under stress were under the same roof as me. It turns out our school's servers, or who knows what was breached. I'm no computer wizard but, around this time I actually had met a computer wizard. Later that same evening when school was over and I was on my way down to the weight room through the Panther Pit alongside some basketball players when one of them exclaimed “Yo David just said schools canceled for the rest of the week!” I had to ask someone reliable like a staff member to confirm. I waited a couple minutes for Centoni to come down to the weight room because the staff had a meeting as soon as school was over. He comes down and confirms the unfortunate news, school had been canceled for the rest of the week.
Mr. Centoni's message sent out to all enrolled in his reminds update system received by me. Tony Garcia for the Tribune
When we returned the next week I tracked down that computer wizard from earlier. I found him during lunch and we made plans for an interview the next day, if anyone had answers, it for sure would be him.
March first, Friday at noon, I met with him at an undisclosed location within the building, I sat down ready to interview hoping for some answers.
Introduce yourself?
My name is Gavin Butcher, I am a junior at central high school
2. Now concerning this technology field, how much background knowledge do you possess?
So currently I am a malware analyst for the time being, and I also am a server admin of a commercial company. I also have personal work in computer science and server experience.
3. Did extracurricular's at the school interest you in this field?
Not really, I would say one of the biggest and most relative extracurricular's was the robotics field. I think the extracurricular was pretty nice, during lunch you could go and mess around with the robots they had built but I didn't go during lunch cause I never really cared.
4. As far as what Happened here on February seventh what do you know?
So on February seventh which was the cyber attack on the school what would happen is a program called lockbit, lockbit-black or lockbit3.0 had been infected onto one of the admin computers and had infected itself through the other computers through printers and projectors
5. And what is this ransomware?
So the ransomware is newly programmed from what I know, knewly as in like three or four months ago 3.0 version being the newest iteration of it or black from what everybody knows. It is a ransomware also known as a worm ransomware which basically locks itself onto a computer and grabs every piece of data that it can and encrypts it so nobody can get it until they pay a “ransom” for their data and files back.
6. Do you believe this could have been prevented? And if so, how?
So something I would say is it definitely could have been prevented more than how it was dealt with today both because the signs of other schools such as Dallas being hit with the exact same program a year later. As well as the personally and unprofessionally, the I.T guys were not up to task with dealing with such a massive problem and their skills could not completely defend the attack.
7. Now I heard that you were accused of doing this. What do you have to say about that?
Uhm, thank you it's an honor to be accused of such a heinous crime, but uh I cannot take any credit for such large scale attack as well as it affecting my education and future employment options.
8. Now who do you think is responsible?
Unfortunately I don't really know who it would be, from rumors that I’ve heard and the basic logs of how the virus was made. It is someone in Europe and counting Might be more because it's a paid program that you can buy anywhere you want.
9. What do we do from now?
Uh I don't know, nor do I really care because at the end of the day its all technology nobody really knows how to use it all that well, even the best of the best can't really understand technology to its fullest potential than again technology is only as smart as you are, so really just depends on how far we take it.
A picture of the supposed ransomware note that was printed out of all the printers in the building edited by Gavin Butcher to cover possibly dangerous links. Tony Garcia for the Tribune
With answers now in hand and my objective complete it brought up more questions, how has this affected us? Specifically those who work and participate in school extracurricular's that I’d assume rely on the internet? Because if your a regular attendee at central I’d believe it's pretty clear on how its affected the average student due to the fact that if you where to take one peek in a hallway full of classes it's evident that technology in the form of said computers, projectors, smart boards, and laptops were leading the march on learning and teaching. In my first year of attending central combined with this year currently my google drive which is what we all used has accumulated 2.94 Gigabytes worth of documents, photos, presentations, ect, which doesn't seem like plenty but majority of these items within my drive are kilobytes and megabytes, 1000 kilobytes fit into a megabyte and 1000 bytes fit into a kilobyte, one gigabyte consists of 1000000 kilobytes. In conclusion it is in fact plenty, further proving how reliant we are on technology and the internet.
That being said I first got in contact with the advisor of the yearbook club in search of someone to answer my newly found questions but I received the opportunity to interview someone from Power Peers first, if you aren't familiar with PowerPeers it is a leadership group elective class here at central, I met with my interviewee before third period and sat down to ask some questions.
Let’s start with your introduction
I’m John Butler, lots of people know me for making John Butler games.
What do you do for PowerPeers and how?
So I produce edit and direct Monday updates which is our schools news broadcast if you have seen it before every Monday? It takes about seven hours each week for me to create it, of course we’re not doing it currently as there’s no internet but soon we’ll be able to get that back up and running.
Can on you tell me what happened on February seventh
Our school had a ransomware attack that got data of some kind and it is being held for ransom.
How has this affected you as well as how has it affected powerpeers as a whole?
With the internet being down it has affected my role because I can't create Monday updates anymore and we’re just limited to Monday announcements. And PowerPeers as a whole, our class specifically hasn't been that affected but the things that we do in this class like how we do our monthly lessons and things that has been affected because there's no internet so there's no projectors, and we cant put stuff up on screens and stuff so we have been pretty affected by that.
Is there anyone or any groups you believe are responsible for this?
I have no information on that.
5. No idea?
no.
With my questions complete just in time before third period I marched on out of Hindmans room one step closer to my objective. That same week I reached out to the editor for the Centralian with an interview planned for Thursday during panther success period. We met and began introductions.
Who are you and what do you specialize in?
I'm Casper Anderson, in school I'm the editor of the central yearbook, the Centralian and I also do band and theater.
As far as you know what happened here on February seventh?
So from what i've heard the original ransomware like worm, the virus, got in several months or weeks prior and infected all the district computers and than once they had as many computers as possible infected they then mass downloaded the ransomware, probably overnight and so then when we came in you know all the printers where printing the ransomware note. Based on the company name my dad who works in computers said that it was probably a russian group, but thats all, thats, I wouldn't call that exactly reliable information but thats my dad theories. But all I know for concrete is that it was a ransomware attack on the school and the reason why that it affected us so easily is because there's really only one entrance point to the network that connected to the entire district so there was no cyber security protection or any barriers really blocking them from just taking it over like that.
How has this tragedy affected the yearbook club?
So in yearbook the first several days or maybe the first week we couldn't really do anything cause obviously all of our work is on the computers, we usually use the desktop computers and even though a lot of us had chromebooks or personal computers that weren't affected since we didn't have wifi we couldn't do anything about it. The second week in february we finally got permission to go to the gate, for it so now everyday we have to walk to the gate and back to get our work done which obviously takes up a lot of time but also when Ms. Szymanski’s not here and we have a sub, which has been pretty common with all the trainings going on we can't go there, and we can’t work on it like in other classes, we can't, when we’re done with our work we can't go to the yearbook room and work on yearbook anymore. And this kind of happened at the worst possible time because the entirety of the main book, those one hundred and twenty pages are due before spring break and so this is like the biggest most important deadline and it just completely knocked us off our feet for like a week and a half I think, and so we lost a lot of that valuable time. And we have lost thousands of photos, all of the photos that we took before the ransomware attack this year are completely gone, we can't use any of them. At this point it's like a ninety-nine percent chance that we’re never getting access to any of them, uhm because they were all stored in the classroom share, the windows network. And so like the wrestling page we had to, I had to go for six hours on both days of the wrestling districts just to take photos because we didn't have any wrestling photos left because none of them had been uploaded onto google drive or anything. In the future we’re probably gonna switch to using the google drive because even though it makes sharing more complicated and it can affect logistics it's just we can't risk something like this again, losing all of those photos was a huge blow like those where thousands of not only photos but also hours of work we put in you know, that was really, bad.
Has you or your peers' mental health been affected by the hack on the yearbook?
I would say so, as the editor I'm kind of overseeing a lot of it I know that Ms. Szymanski has gotten really stressed about it too, she's the advisor and like that's her job you know. But we needed to make sure that we could get a book to the seniors before their last day of school cause usually the books are available on the yearbook party day which is the last week of may which is like, the last week that the seniors are there and so we needed to make sure we could do that so yeah it was a lot of stress. I would like to say I managed pretty well and that the other people have also but our attendance in yearbook also dropped way down cause people just didn't feel like they were making any progress or that anything was really going anywhere, And so like a lot of people have just been gone cause since we’re going to the gate it doesn't really feel like we’re making any progress, we are we’re gonna get the book done. At this point I can say that we are going to get the book done and submitted but it was really close there for a while.
Are there any procedures or regulations? Backups, in check that would have helped you in case of an unfortunate event such as this?
Yeah, I think if we had, like I mentioned if we had, had them on google drive this wouldn't have happened cause google already has that kinda second protection, it's not attached to physical computers. But, procedures? Not I mean on a school wide scale yeah if we had been more prepared for this on school wide, I think a lot of this could have been avoided but yearbook wise there wasn't really anything that we could have done other than. Our old photos from previous years are all on google drive but the ones that we are using we had on the school hard drives because it was a lot easier to get to, it was a lot easier to download straight to the computers moving photos around, everybody automatically had access so it was just a lot more convenient but yeah I think school wide there was a huge lack of any kind of protection for it cause like I mentioned there was like one entry point and from that computer from whatever got the ransomware in, it could have been a spam email it could have been some other type of virus but once it got into one computer it could get into the entire district and there was nothing really stopping that and there were no procedures in place for that happening, yeah.
Is there anyone or any groups you believe are responsible for the siege on the internet?
Like I mentioned I think the ransomware attack, the lock bit I think it was called? My dads pretty informed on this and he said usually that's Russian people and the grammar mistakes in the ransomware letter would also support that but I mean mostly I think it's the schools kinda, the districts not the schools , the districts not having appropriate barriers. Because of that honestly the student body and the teachers could sue the school, I mean they have things like, our social security numbers where on powerschool, uhm I can't work on things like scholarships at school anymore I’m falling behind on college applications cause I can't use things like psp to get on that I haven't been able to get into naviance. There's so much that has gotten affected by the ransomware,like literally the fact that this ransomware group got a hold of our information that easily and no one really did anything, yeah I know, I don't think suing the school is a good idea cause we’re already a public school we don't need to be poor.
And with that my investigation had come to an end. As for the Tribune I can't fully speak on their behalf due to the fact that I believe I joined the week the internet was taken but what I can say is that it forced a complete halt to our uploading schedule website wise because no one on a school computer can access our website and it also affected our attendance but that was pretty much the end of it.
During this investigation I frequently heard acute mentions of Dallas High school, from my understanding the same event had affected Dallas last year or the year before that I’m not sure but this unfortunate event is definitely one for the history books or at least a yearbook. As for that though I would like to thank all the people that helped me find these phenomenal sources of people, and the individuals that I interviewed of course get praise, Tony Garcia for the Central Tribune have a great day.