York Region school board target of 'cyber incident,' police investigating

Police are investigating a ‘cyber incident’ that took York Region District School Board’s network offline earlier this week.

YRDSB confirmed the Nov. 8 breach in a statement published to X on Friday afternoon.

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“The board is working with third party experts, including legal and technical, to analyze the extent of the incident and begin work to restore services,” the statement read in part.

A notice posted to the YRDSB website shows that its Wi-Fi, email, and phone systems are all currently down.

The board said it took “mitigating action” as soon as the breach was detected, but it’s unclear what data, if any, was affected or compromised.

Phone lines for safe arrivals and emergencies are still working, according to the YRDSB website, although response times may be delayed.

The source of the apparent cyberattack is unclear at this time, but the board said police are investigating.

York Region District School Board. (Mike Arsalides/CTV News)

YRDSB’s breach is the fourth cybersecurity incident in the last several weeks to affect a public-facing Ontario institution.

Officials at Toronto's Michael Garron Hospital said Wednesday that the personal information of employees and clinicians was stolen during an October cyberattack.

Before that, on Oct. 23, hackers targeted a number of hospitals and health-care institutions in southwestern Ontario and have since published some of that data to the dark web.

Two days earlier, a ransomware attack at the Toronto Public Library caused a 10-day outage. On Friday, the library said sensitive data caught up in that breach “may have been exposed.”