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Updated April 7, 2025, 8:39 p.m. ET
- The Fall River Public Schools network was breached by hackers.
- Cybersecurity and law enforcement are investigating the incident.
- Until the incident is resolved, students and staff will have to make some changes.
FALL RIVER — The public school district’s internal network has been hacked, according to a message from Superintendent Tracy Curley sent to parents.
“At this time, there is no evidence that any student or staff personal data was accessed or misused,” the statement reads. “If that changes, we will immediately notify anyone who has been affected.”
Curley’s letter says the Chief Information Officer Scott Cabral became aware of the “cybersecurity incident” earlier Monday.
According to sources in the school system, on Monday many students were not able to use the school’s wireless network or their Chromebooks.
Curley said “third-party cybersecurity experts and law enforcement” are involved in an investigation to resolve the hack.
What does this cybersecurity hack mean for Fall River students and parents?
Curley said most students and staff will have no internet access across the district.
Students were due to begin MCAS testing; that schedule “will be altered,” with schools postponing testing due to begin Tuesday.
Attendance calls for absent students “will be paused,” Curley wrote, with attendance taken at all schools.
All schools’ phone lines are still working.
Other local schools and organizations have been victims
Curley did not specify the nature of the hack.
However, it’s not the first time that network systems at local organizations have proven vulnerable to attacks from hackers, which can sometimes take weeks to resolve. In hacks often referred to as ransomware, hackers break into networks and hold data hostage in exchange for a ransom, usually cryptocurrency.
In 2013, Swansea police paid off scammers who encrypted several files in their computer system and held them for ransom, paying $750, then the value of two Bitcoins.
In 2019, the city of New Bedford suffered a major ransomware attack with criminals demanding $5.3 million in Bitcoin. The city counteroffered $400,000 from insurance proceeds; when this was rejected, the city worked with tech support to successfully recover the data.
Somerset Berkley Regional High School was hit with a ransomware attack in 2020, Newport schools were hit with malware in 2019 and Brockton police suffered a cyberattack in the summer of 2021 that knocked network systems offline.
In December 2022, Bristol Community College was the victim of a ransomware attack that affected all campuses for weeks. The next month, Swansea Public Schools shut down for a day a ransomware attack of its own.
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