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The application portal for public post-secondary institutions in British Columbia has been temporarily offline for over a week following a data breach.
In a Thursday update, EducationPlannerBC says that, on Nov. 3, it identified a “cybersecurity incident affecting its application system.”
It confirmed “an unauthorized actor gained access to a limited amount of applicant data including applicant names, contact details and gender,” but said information such as social insurance numbers, banking or financial information were not accessed.
The update went on to say EducationPlannerBC “recognizes that being offline may cause concern for applicants with upcoming program deadlines and is working closely with its post-secondary institutional partners to minimize impacts on applicants.”
Chester Wisniewski with Sophos said it was wise to take the site offline. (Simon Gohier/CBC)
Chester Wisniewski, director at security software company Sophos, says it was a prudent decision to take the site offline.
“Most of these attacks on education [institutions] are extortion ransom-style attacks, where they’re trying to intentionally compromise sensitive records and demand money to not release that publicly,” he said.
“The best thing you can do if you discover an attack very early in the process is to cut off all access, [for] good guys and bad guys. That’s the one way of ensuring that, if there’s been a compromise of some sort, it doesn’t progress further and cause far greater harm.”
Rebecca Pimm of Fort St. John, B.C., says her sons were unable to submit school applications this past week, and the technical issues have made the already stressful process of applying to schools even more challenging.
“The entire system is centralized so you have a single point of failure … I don’t think that makes a very robust system,” Pimm said.
“Beyond that single point of failure, there doesn’t appear to be a contingency plan.”
In a statement, the University of British Columbia says it’s committed to ensuring no student application is adversely affected by the outage.
Simon Fraser University says its applications for the 2027 fall term close at the end of January, and there are no plans to extend application deadlines.
News of the data breach comes after a cyberattack that affected the Burnaby School District.
A CBC News investigation found that a Russian ransomware group posted screenshots on the dark web from what appears to be a database stolen from the Burnaby School District.
Wisniewski says such cyberattacks are a growing concern.
“We’ve been seeing this for 10 or 15 years now, but I think the pace has been accelerating a bit in the last couple of years,” he said. “The criminals have had a lot of success in the past making money doing this.”
