Suspects Cyber Attacked The Rockford Public School 205 District System

RPS 205 parents/guardians and staff,

Our district is working with a professional forensic firm to investigate this ransomware attack.

We are still working to both recover and rebuild our systems. We want all employees to know that our forensic firm has not identified any specific personal information that was accessed by the attacker group. However, the investigation did determine that user names and passwords might have been involved.

When you log onto your RPS 205 email account or onto a district-issued device in the coming days, you will be forced to change your password to gain access. As a precaution, please change any personal passwords that you have used on a district-issued device, as well.

We are still investigating whether any student or staff personal information was affected by this incident. We will share more information as soon as we’re able to provide it.

Our Information Technology team continues to make progress during our districtwide systems outage. We expect to hit several milestones this week, such as restoring access to phones, bells and PA systems; providing staff with access to Google, Google Classroom and Google Drive, and restoring access to districtwide WiFi so students can use Chromebooks in class, as well. We will share a time frame to expect access in the coming days.

Our Information Technology team is working around the clock to rebuild our network and restore access.

We continue to share our thanks to our teachers, principals, staff, students and parents for their patience and understanding during this outage