Online literacy test for Ontario students cancelled due to cyberattack: EQAO
Posted Oct 24, 2016 11:48:41 AM.
Last Updated Oct 24, 2016 12:34:57 PM.
This article is more than 5 years old.
TORONTO – The Ontario agency tasked with administering the first online literacy test to tens of thousands of high school students in the province last week says it was forced to pull the plug by an “intentional, malicious and sustained” cyberattack.
The Education Quality and Accountability Office says it was an intentional, malicious and sustained “distributed denial of service” attack that impacted the agency’s ability to conduct the test.
EQAO says no personal or private student information was compromised during the shutdown on Thursday.
Director Richard Jones says, “EQAO shares the frustration that students, parents, teachers, schools and school board educators and administrators feel about the outcome of the assessment. We were shocked to learn that someone would deliberately interfere with the administration of the online OSSLT. There will be discussions over the next few weeks to determine how to strengthen the system, and we will continue to work with Ontario’s education community to understand how best to use online assessments to benefit our province’s students.”
The office says an in-depth and ongoing investigation will lead to recommendations on how to prevent similar incidents in the future.
Most of the province’s 900 secondary schools had signed up to participate in the test, which was a technical trial run before the first official test scheduled next year.
The EQAO, which oversees standardized testing in the province, says it is confident that student assessments can successfully be administered online.
It says an investigation is underway and will lead to recommendations to prevent similar problems in the future.
