13,000 Singaporean Students Are Suffering after a Hacking Attempt Wiped Their Devices Clean

• 13,000 students from Singapore lost all their device data after the popular digital classroom management tool Mobile Guardian was compromised.
• Singapore's Ministry of Education has already removed the platform for the devices.
• Mobile Guardian has halted its services until the investigation is complete.

At least 13,000 students from 26 schools in Singapore have lost their data from their school-issued iPads and Chromebooks after a hacker breached the popular digital classroom management platform Mobile Guardian.

Mobile Guardian is popular for K-12 schools and offers classroom management, device management, parental control, secure web filtering, and communication channels. In short, it's a one-stop digital education tool and has been Singapore's official mobile device management provider for public schools since 2020.

However, on August 4, 2024, a hacker gained unauthorized access to the platform. Their purpose was probably to steal data, but there doesn't seem to be any signs of data exfiltration yet. And although users from North America and Europe are probably affected by the breach, only Singapore came forward with a number.

While Mobile Guardian says that only a small percentage of devices" were unenrolled from Mobile Guardian and their data was wiped, Singapore alone has at least 13,000, which doesn't seem so small.

Then, on 5th August (Monday), Singapore's Ministry of Education said that it will remove the app from all devices it issues and students will only be given restricted access to their devices until the matter is resolved.

Response of the Ministry and Mobile Guardian

The Education Ministry is also trying to restore the data for those 13,000 students and has taken up the matter with the company.

MOE immediately registered strong concerns with mobile device management company Mobile Guardian.' - The MOE

Meanwhile, Mobile Guardian has been quiet ever since it made the announcement. We reached out for a comment but haven't heard back. It has also stayed quiet about the method of attack and whether they have been able to identify the attacker or not. We also don't know if the company received any ransom requests yet.

The only thing we know for sure is that the company halted its services for the time being, probably to investigate the matter and prevent other users from being affected. So until further information, none of the users will be able to log into their accounts.

Previous Security Breach In April 2024

The worst part about this whole situation is that this was not the first security issue with Mobile Guardian. In April, the company's user management portal had been compromised which affected roughly 127 schools in Singapore, making it a much bigger breach than the latest one.

This portal keeps information on account licensing, customer support, and other administrative tasks which means it has a record of the user's name, email addresses, school names, and whether the user is a parent or school staff member and all of this confidential data was compromised.

Overall, the data of 67,000 parents and 22,000 school staff was accessed.

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