Tag Archive for: Iowa

Hacking Attack Narrowly Misses Davenport, Iowa, School District

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(TNS) — Davenport Community School District said Thursday that a hacker gained access to the district’s system earlier this month.

The district said there was no evidence that any personal information was compromised, and there was no ransom. It believes it thwarted a cyber attack.

The district originally told reporters that its servers were undergoing repairs, and that was causing Internet outages and phone and email problems that lasted more than a week. Some parents and teachers said they doubted the district’s explanations at the time.


According to Superintendent TJ Schneckloth, the district could not release facts about the incident until now because of an ongoing forensic investigation conducted in the weeks following the initial Internet outage.

“In these instances, language matters. We take any threat to the district very seriously, and we want want to know exactly what we’re dealing with first,” he said. “We had to be 100% certain about what the threat to our system was.”

The district also wanted to avoid revealing their efforts to potential threat actors.

“Oftentimes, if you begin to speak about something you don’t know about, you’re also relating what the threat is to the people potentially threatening you,” Schneckloth said. “These threat actors have the potential to be watching at all times. So until you can identify what those issues are, you really have to only report what’s there.”

No perpetrator was identified.

“In these instances, it’s very difficult to identify anyone,” Schneckloth said. “When you look at what’s happening with cyber attacks across the nation, the most important thing is the safety and security of your current environment. So that’s exactly what we did.”

The district’s IT staff collaborated with national forensic experts to investigate the intrusion.

District IT staff took systems offline in light of the incident, but all have been restored. The district said it has “doubled their efforts” to prevent similar attacks in the future.

“We see this as an opportunity to learn and grow in our knowledge and preparation,” Schneckloth said in a statement. “We remain diligent and on guard against…

Source…

Iowa State Students Make Demands Over School Trademark Policy Public, Plan Possible First Amendment Lawsuit

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Iowa State University just cannot stop shooting itself in the foot. After attempting to bully a pro-marijuana student organization out of using school iconography, the school both lost the lawsuit that came afterwards and managed to piss away nearly half a million dollars in taxpayer money in having to pay out the would-be victims of its bullying. Instead of learning its lesson after that whole episode, ISU instead decided to alter its trademark usage policy to be way more restrictive, which only pushed student organizations to drop references to the school en masse. At the same time, the student government issued a resolution demanding the school review its policy again and make it less restrictive. Administration officials at that time agreed to meet with the student government to hear their concerns.

Well, that meeting happened this past week, and everybody is still seriously pissed off.

Student organizations demonstrated their issues with Iowa State’s administration for its implementation of a new trademark policy at a meeting Thursday evening.  For the immediate future, Student Government wants an apology from the university and an immediate block on the enforcement of the policy. They have alternate plans of action if this deliberation works out poorly.

Woodruff, other members of Student Government and organization presidents agreed that acts of protest like wearing trademarked clothing and sending emails to university officials were encouraged. Student Government also talked to Student Legal Services regarding a possible lawsuit on using the First Amendment as a basis for suit.

For the second time in a couple of years, ISU might find itself the subject of a First Amendment lawsuit brought against it by its own students. Given its track record and the insane amount of money it had to pay out the last time, it would be flatly insane for the school to allow things to get the point of a lawsuit. But, then, this is ISU we’re talking about.

One of the chief issues the student government has is that the administration apparently has tried to cut them out of the process at every turn.

One issue that Student Government had with the process is the lack of transparency. Woodruff said they have not been able to produce any documentation, including the email that was sent out to club organization presidents, Regent or Big 12 policies that may have prompted the new university measures. In addition to this, he said the meetings that the university had about this subject originally were not public and did not have any minutes recorded.

“Things are getting worse, not better,” Woodruff said. “This fuse is getting shorter and shorter.”

And that’s not a good sign for the school, given the threat of a possible lawsuit on the horizon. Adding to much of the anger is that much of the iconography and mascot imagery the school uses, and is attempting to control through its trademark policy, were student creations from long ago. To turn the trademark policy like a gun on its own student groups could pretty much only lead to anger.

It’s a full on mystery why the school doesn’t just scrap this altogether and agree to work with its students on a sane trademark usage policy. Perhaps doing so would end this, ahem, cyclone of dissent.

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Iowa Veterans Home warns nearly 3000 of data breach – KCCI Des Moines

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KCCI Des Moines

Iowa Veterans Home warns nearly 3000 of data breach
KCCI Des Moines
The Iowa Veterans Home announced Friday that it is beginning to notify 2,969 people of a data breach that may have exposed their medical and financial information. Advertisement. According to a release from the IVH, Google and the state of Iowa were …

data breach – Google News