Reply-All storm sparked by student smut sees school system shut down Google Classroom for up to a week
- Reference: 1597654570
- News link: https://www.theregister.co.uk/2020/08/17/act_schools_email_incident/
- Source link:
The affected schools are in the Australian Capital Territory, a region of Australia that houses the nation’s capital city of Canberra.
The incident started last Friday, when the local Education Directorate [1]says student inboxes started to fill with “spam emails containing inappropriate material.”
Local media reports that the emails included links to smut, photos of genitalia and images of deceased children.
The Directorate quickly came to the conclusion that “students gained access to system email distribution lists and inappropriately used these to send emails to their peers.”
The ensuing Reply-All storm, much of it comprised of mails asking someone to stop the flow of horrible material, was only stopped when the Directorate pulled the plug on Gmail and Google Classroom.
Today the Directorate issued an [2]update that confirms “The incident occurred when a student attempted to share their work with their classmates, accidentally using a global distribution list code. Other students ‘replied all’ and a small number of students shared inappropriate content, including pornographic imagery.”
The mess was only possible because some students used their personal devices to share the smut, which the Directorate swears would not have been possible to access from within the schools it operates.
“Over the weekend we have worked to remove access to global distribution lists and rigorously test our systems to ensure students cannot again access the lists,” the update says. “An external consultant is providing independent oversight to ensure the ongoing safety of our Google platform.”
But this will all take time: Google Classroom and Google Drive are due back online on Tuesday, with students told they’ll enjoy “access to their email accounts by the end of this week.”
And there's your new case study on restricting access to mailing lists, content-filtering and how to manage personal devices that access cloud services. ®
Get our [3]Tech Resources
[1] https://www.education.act.gov.au/about-us/all-news-and-news-alerts/news-items/august-2020/act-public-schools-email-incident
[2] https://www.education.act.gov.au/about-us/all-news-and-news-alerts/news-items/august-2020/update-on-act-public-school-student-email-incident
[3] https://whitepapers.theregister.com/
For those of you who have ever seen Mel Brook's "The History Of The World Part 1", the commandment "Thou shalt not reply all" was on the stone tablet he dropped.....
Friends don't let friends hit Reply-All.
how did a student sent to the global list anyway? the student shouldn't see that little entry
Not possible?
"The mess was only possible because some students used their personal devices to share the smut, which the Directorate swears would not have been possible to access from within the schools it operates."
I'm fairly certain I just heard someone saying "challenge accepted".
Re: Not possible?
typical Australian government and public servant response.
"Not our fault, it was someone else"
Re: Not possible?
typical Australian government and public servant human response.
There, fixed it for you.
Re: Not possible?
I'm fairly certain I just heard someone saying "challenge accepted".
I wouldn't be surprised if similar thinking was behind the reply-alls that followed it.
Surely they're using G-Suite Enterprise for Education?
Which has a massive tonne of options for dealing with crap like that? What content policies were in place, etc. etc. What about ACLs for the Google Groups? Why didn't they use the tools available to them to manage this kind of stuff? I also don't believe the directorate when it says they shouldn't have been able to use their own personal devices - unless it's a massive great big security hole in G Suite, which I doubt. Once they do sort this out, I suggest sending everybody involved in maintaining the system on a G Suite admin course post-haste.
i bet it followed the pattern laid down by god unto moses:
chain:
you did it too!
>oh my god guys stop sending me this
>>/unsubscribe
>>>/unsubscribe
>>>>/unsubscribe
>>>>>/unsubscribe
>>>>>>/unsubscribe