16-year-old student arrested, accused of cyberattacks on Miami-Dade County schools

Police in Florida have arrested a 16-year-old South Miami Senior High School student on suspicion of carrying out a series of cyberattacks which have crippled the Miami-Dade County Public Schools online learning system since students began the fall semester Monday.

The student, a junior who was not identified by name, admitted to “orchestrating eight Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDOS) cyber attacks designed to overwhelm District networks, including web-based systems needed for My School Online,” according to officials with the Miami-Dade Schools Police Department. Police said the 16-year-old used an online application to carry out the attacks.

The teenager has been charged with using a computer in an attempt to defraud, a third-degree felony, and interference with an educational institution, a second-degree misdemeanor.

Issues for the school district have been pervasive since Monday, when area students began distance learning for the 2020-2021 school year. Serving nearly 275,000 students, the Miami-Dade County Public Schools system is the fourth-largest school district in the U.S., according to WPLG.

Superintendent Alberto Carvalho told reporters Tuesday that cyberattacks alongside a software glitch blocked students and teachers from accessing the district’s servers, making online learning “nearly impossible,” the Miami Herald reported. He said that the software issue, which involved bad code, was “100% resolved and optimized” by Tuesday. However, the simultaneous DDOS attacks created “a bottleneck of system requests that overwhelmed servers and locked students and teachers out,” according to the Herald.

Police said Thursday that they believe other people have also carried out attacks on district servers.

“We will not rest until every one of them is caught and brought to justice,” Miami-Dade Public Schools police Chief Edwin Lopez said in a statement. “Cyber attacks are serious crimes, which have far-reaching negative impacts. Our message to anyone thinking of attempting a criminal act like this is to think twice. We will find you.”

On Wednesday, Miami-Dade County School Board member Steve Gallon told WPLG that he was focused on not only the causes of the cyberattacks but also on prevention.

“My No. 1 question will not simply be about the attack, but about what provisions and policies and practices we have in place to mitigate and abate those particular attacks,” he told WPLG.

School districts nationwide have pivoted to online learning in an effort to stymie the spread of the coronavirus. The United States leads the world with the most coronavirus cases and the highest death toll. Since the start of the pandemic, officials have confirmed more than 6.1 million infections and reported more than 185,000 deaths nationwide, according to numbers compiled by Johns Hopkins University.

As of Thursday, more than 26 million COVID-19 cases have been reported worldwide and more than 863,000 people have died of the viral infection, according to Johns Hopkins.

Cox Media Group