Lindenhurst School District: Cyberattack Caused Internet Outage

LINDENHURST, NY — A cyberattack caused internet outages at the Lindenhurst School District last week, according to Superintendent Daniel Giordano.

In a letter to the community, Giordano said the district’s Network Operations Center determined the cause of the intermittent outages was a Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) cyberattack against the district. This kind of attack involves someone trying to flood a system with data to overwhelm the internet, rendering it useless to the user.

Giordano said such an attack is "not uncommon among businesses and government organizations."

These attacks are used to cause disruption as opposed to obtaining information, he said, adding "absolutely no personal data" was breached in the process.

"Under the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, such attacks are illegal and can result in imprisonment and up to $500,000 in fines," the letter read. "This crime has been reported by the district to the Suffolk County Police Department. As per the New York State plan, the SCPD are responsible to report the attack to the Department of Homeland Security, who will investigate. The district’s Network Operations Center has been working tirelessly to improve the quality of the internet service for this week and will continue to do so."