Cyberattack shuts down student tests in Kansas

Two coordinated cyberattacks temporarily halted the website responsible for administering transitional assessments in Kansas' 286 school districts. As a result, students in grades 3-8 and 11 could not take tests in language arts, math and reading. 

The type of attack is known as a distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack, more commonly referred to as a system overload. Computers containing a virus are instructed by an attacker to flood the website at the same time, causing the server to crash. 

Both the Kansas State Department of Education and the University of Kansas Center for Educational Testing and Evaluation (CETE) insist the incident was a one-way attack and that no data related to students or parents was obtained. On April 2, CETE shared an official update about the assessments, known as the Kansas Interactive Testing Engine (KITE) system: