HUMBLE, Texas — Humble ISD’s first day of school suffered a delay early Tuesday after an apparent cyberattack, school district officials confirmed.
The school district sent an alert to parents about the technical issue:
“The MyHumble Server experienced a denial of service cyber attack from about 8 to 9 a.m. Systems are working now. During the attack, students were unable to log into MyHumble to access Schoology or their Humble ISD Gmail. Staff were able to log into Humble ISD Gmail.”
The district said MyHumble serves as a secure way for students to log in to email and learning platforms.
A local tech expert says these denial of service attacks are common.
"It’s when many people, they could be real people they could be computerized bots try to ping a server all at the same time. When everything gets so busy, 500 people try to get into someone’s door obviously you can’t do that," said Michael Garfield, the "High-Tech Texan."
The school district said it was able to fix the problem, and in pictures on Twitter shared by the school district, you can see teachers were able to get back to work. So why did this happen?
"It could be someone who is really mad at the company. It could be someone trying to steal information. Other times, it maybe, you know, what I think the servers weren’t ready to handle the traffic and it just got overwhelmed," Garfield said.
In the meantime, Garfield shared some tips to follow for you and your children on their first days of school.
"Get the process down with your kids. Make sure everything is working for the first few days. To make sure things are working and let them know if something goes wrong watch for an email or for some reason, just sign off. If there is anything that looks weird, tell them to log off," Garfield said.
Humble ISD said they are investigating the attack and are continuing to update their cyber security to protect their network.