A cyberattack is being blamed for the technical issues that forced the cancellation of the province's online literacy test for high school students last week.
The Education Quality and Accountability Office (EQAO) confirmed on Monday the online trial run was targeted by an "intentional, malicious and sustained Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack."
A statement on the EQAO website reads "an extremely large volume of traffic from a vast set of IP addresses around the globe was targeted at the network hosting the assessment application. The impact of this DDoS, initiated by an unknown entity or entities, was to block legitimate users."
The trial of the online Ontario Secondary School Literacy Test was cancelled last Thursday after thousands of Grade 10 students in Ontario were unable to log onto the EQAO site.
The attack began shortly before 8am. During its height, it accounted for 99% of the traffic in the system, blocking legitimate users who were trying to log on.
"We were shocked to learn that someone would deliberately interfere with the administration of the online OSSLT," says Richard Jones, director of assessment at the EQAO. "There will be discussions over the next few weeks to determine how to strengthen the system, and we will continue to work with Ontario’s education community to understand how best to use online assessments to benefit our province’s students."
An independent third-party forensic firm is assisting with the investigation into the incident.
EQAO officials stress no personal or private student information was compromised as a result of the cyberattack.