SOL Disruptions Caused by Denial-of-Service Attack

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schoolbusStudents throughout the school division experienced intermittent disruptions in their SOL testing Wednesday due to a distributed denial-of-service attack on Pearson Education test servers.

"This malicious, third party attack was a deliberate attempt to overload and slow down system traffic," Vice President, Media and Communities Laura Howe said in a release. "It’s also important to know that we worked throughout the day yesterday to mitigate the attacks, minimize the disruptions and return service to normal."

According to Howe these attacks were not attempts to access student data; no student data was compromised.

Pearson is actively monitoring activity on their systems throughout the testing window to minimize future disruptions for students.

"We will continue to work today to strengthen our defenses to fend off these attacks," she said.

Instructional technology professionals through Prince William County Schools have voiced their frustrations with the testing system, citing outages before and beyond the DDoS attack.

One individual commented that this year's issue surpasses last year's.

"We understand the frustration around this issue so we are working proactively to make sure students have a good testing experience," she said. "We apologize for any inconvenience this has caused."

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