Cyberattack on Prince George's County Public Schools hit 4,500 accounts

Prince George's County Public Schools, one of the largest school districts in Maryland, said it was the victim of a cyberattack detected on 14 August 2023, just as the school year was beginning. The incident caused a broad network outage across the district.

The district reported that roughly 4,500 of its approximately 180,000 user accounts were compromised, and said it believed most of them belonged to staff rather than students. It also said its main business and student information systems, Oracle and SchoolMAX, did not appear to have been affected.

As an immediate measure, PGCPS required all users to reset their passwords. It engaged outside cybersecurity and forensic specialists to determine the full extent of the intrusion, and said a third-party security team would contact affected users with further information about their accounts. Officials noted that the attack resembled incidents reported by other school districts around the country.

The district confirmed that identification details had been compromised but said it did not yet know the full scope, and that a complete data review would take several weeks before individual notifications could be sent. In the meantime PGCPS offered free credit monitoring and identity protection services through Experian to staff and students. The investigation remained open as of the August 2023 reporting.