Following suspicious activity on servers belonging to the Ministry of Education and some of its websites on Tuesday, officials have raised concerns that the digital systems were compromised. Among the services that had stopped working are the teachers' portal which is used by employees of the ministry to view general and personal information, submit requests and inquiries, produce online certificates, and more. Likewise, 41 websites of the ministry's various units were also no longer functioning.
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According to an internal letter circulated to employees and obtained by Israel Hayom, it appears that the Ministry of Education was of the view that this was a serious incident and cyber teams were working to gain control over it and prevent leaks of sensitive data. According to the letter, the affected server includes the teachers' portal, the local authorities portal, and 41 websites of the ministry's various units, including the district websites and the Testing Division site. It is also claimed in the letter that restoring the fallen websites could take a month.
The full extent of the incident or who was behind it has yet to be determined, but in light of the major cyber-attacks experienced by various bodies and institutions in the country since the Gaza War began, the Ministry of Education decided to immediately take the suspicious server offline.
The Ministry of Education issued in response to the revelation the following statement: "The ministry's main website was not attacked and is functioning as usual. There is no indication of leakage of sensitive information from the ministry's systems. However, after suspicious activity was identified on the external server farm, the ministry took immediate action to shut off the suspicious server This is a server that supports some of the ministry's content sites and two of the ministry's portals, which do not contain personal information or sensitive data. The incident is currently under investigation".
No response was received from the Israel National Digital Agency.
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