Case Study 5 (Hackers)- The Thomas Deacon Academy

Threat
On Saturday 29th March 2014 the computer systems of the Thomas Deacon Academy were hacked into/breached. The person behind the attack gained access to the Head Teacher's account and sent out lists of confidential documents that were stored on the account. This threatened the privacy of the staff that trusted the school to keep their information safe and also the school's promise to adhere to the principles of the Data Protection Act 1998.
Impact
The security breach led to a whole range of negative impacts for both the school itself and it's staff.When the email with confidential documents were sent out to all students personal information was leaked, this included information about staff salaries, addresses and bank details of staff and information about previous convictions members of staff have had. There was also an effect on the students, the leaked documents were sent over the email system (Microsoft Office Outlook) it had to be shut down before the safety of the system could be guaranteed again. This mainly meant that students got behind on work because they couldn't contact teachers to get help and they also couldn't sent their coursework to them so a lot of deadlines were missed leading to more pressure to get the work finished later in the year. The final impact it had was on the IT department and the finances the IT department had to work over time to call and call in a specialist to work on reestablishing the defences. New defences had to be purchased and a series of new password policies had to be put in place to ensure a breach could never happen again, all of this costing a large amount of money to implement.  
Resolution
After around a week of emails being down a new firewall system was built to protect the system so emails and all of the areas of the VLE were opened back up because the system was considered safe enough not to be breached. When the culprit was found there was no public statement made , this means that many of the outcomes are speculated. It is widely speculated that the culprit was one of the students at the school and that the student excluded from the school.