Manchester Schools' Internet Disruptions Caused By Outside Attack

MANCHESTER, NJ — Internet issues within the Manchester Township Schools that forced the district to shut down in-person classes and have teachers teach from home have been determined to be an attack on the schools’ internet by outside groups.

The attacks, referred to as a distributed denial of service, happened several times, Superintendent David Trethaway said.

A distributed denial of service attack is like an unexpected traffic jam on a highway, according to the website for Cloudflare, an internet networking company. The attacks are malicious and designed to disrupt normal traffic on a website or server.

The traffic was intercepted by the district’s firewall, so no personal information was compromised, he said.But the district’s system was hit multiple times and caused the district’s network to shut down, Trethaway said.

“This is a serious situation and we have notified the police as well as the New Jersey Cybersecurity and Communications Integration Cell,” he said. The person or people responsible for the attacks would face serious consequences if they are identified, he said.

To resolve the issue the district had to subscribe to an outside service to stop it from happening.
“While this process took longer than expected, I can now state that all the safeguards are in place and fully functioning,” Trethaway said. Another DDOS attack last week was handled through the safeguards and stopped from disrupting the schools.

“I want to emphasize that this internet outage was not in any way the fault of our staff or our district. This is not a normal occurrence and we responded as quickly as possible and did everything possible to shorten the recovery time,” he said. “Ultimately, we were dependent on the timeline for the implementation of the safeguards completed by an outside vendor.”

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