Students' notes wiped by hacked MOE app, disrupting prelims preparation

As thousands of secondary school students prepare for their preliminary examinations, a significant cybersecurity breach has left many struggling to recover crucial notes and study materials. The incident, which involved the hacking of the Ministry of Education's (MOE) Mobile Guardian application, has affected approximately 13,000 students from 26 schools across Singapore.

Esther (not her real name), a Secondary 4 student at Methodist Girls’ School (MGS), was shocked to discover on Sunday night (4 August) that her notes from the past four years had vanished. She was set to take her elementary mathematics and English language papers the following day. "How am I going to do my exams? And how am I going to pass my O-Levels in two months?" she told Channel News Asia on Monday night.

"I have all my notes on my iPad, and I cannot memorise them anymore."

The breach prompted MOE to announce on Monday morning that the Mobile Guardian application, which enables parents to manage students’ device usage, would be removed from all students' personal learning devices. The schools had alerted MOE on Sunday night after students reported being unable to access their apps and stored information on their iPads or Chromebooks.

However, some students had experienced issues as early as last week. At MGS and Raffles Girls School (RGS), students faced problems accessing the Internet on their iPads and had to factory reset their devices, resulting in the loss of their work.

Esther expressed her frustration and concern over the loss of her notes. "It’s very saddening to see a lot of my classmates and even myself lose four years' worth of notes, thrown down the drain like that and just all gone in an instant. We didn’t even know that this was going to happen, so it just caught us all off guard," she said. "We were just revising and then suddenly the notes were all gone, and we had no way of getting it back. This definitely affected our performance in prelims, especially today."

Hailey (not her real name), a student from RGS, had noticed issues last week and backed up her device. However, on Sunday night, she found that about half of her apps, including those for notetaking and homework, had disappeared. She managed to recover her notes using her iCloud backup but empathised with classmates who were not as fortunate.

Ms Karen Goh, whose daughter is a Secondary 3 student at MGS, described a similar situation. Despite backing up her device, her daughter lost access to her notes when the apps downloaded through Mobile Guardian were removed. Ms Goh noted the anxiety among students facing upcoming exams and assessments.

Mitchell (not his real name), a Secondary 3 student at Riverside Secondary School, also lost many annotations on his worksheets due to the breach. His school is working to reset devices in batches and help students recover their notes via backup.

At Dunman High School, students faced problems with their Chromebooks on Monday morning, with most websites locked by Mobile Guardian. Secondary 3 student Pearlyn (not her real name) reported that many students could not complete a graded project due to the disruption. Fortunately, their files were still accessible through the school’s Google Drive.

MOE stated that efforts are underway to safely restore devices to normal usage and is considering alternative measures to regulate device usage during this period. Additional IT roving teams and learning resources will be deployed to support affected students.

This incident marks the second cybersecurity breach involving Mobile Guardian in six months. In April, a data leak compromised the names and email addresses of parents and teachers from several schools in Singapore.

At that time, MOE promised to work with cybersecurity experts to prevent future occurrences. Despite these assurances, the recent breach has raised concerns about the effectiveness of these measures and the ongoing vulnerability of students' personal learning devices.

Minister for Education, Chan Chun Sing told Parliament, "MG [Mobile Guardian] had assessed that the compromised support account was primarily attributed to poor password management practice and not the result of the unauthorised individual exploiting vulnerabilities in MG's systems."

"MOE takes a serious view of this incident. Our IT service providers are contractually obligated to take reasonable measures to protect personal data against loss and unauthorised access. MOE has registered our deep dissatisfaction with MG over this incident. We have asked MG to appoint a forensic investigator to evaluate its systems and processes and provide recommendations to prevent a recurrence. Investigations are ongoing. Appropriate actions will be taken should there be breaches of contractual obligations," said Mr Chan back in May this year.

For now, affected students are allowed to bring their own devices or laptops from home to use in class as MOE and schools work to resolve the issue. The breach has left many students and parents anxious about the security of their data and the impact on their academic performance.