MOE: Restoring devices for exam students prioritized after Mobile Guardian hack

SINGAPORE: In an update, the Ministry of Education (MOE) announced that all affected devices from Mobile Guardian’s glitch and cybersecurity breach will be restored by August 16.

Schools are prioritizing repairs for students preparing for their national examinations in 2024, including O-level and N-level students.

MOE emphasized that restoring devices for these students is its top priority.

“We aim to attend to the remaining affected devices by the end of next week,” MOE stated on Wednesday (Aug 7), as reported by The Straits Times.

“We are encouraged to see a sense of community among our students as many of them came together and rallied around their affected classmates to provide for both emotional and practical support such as sharing of their notes.”

Additional IT engineers have been deployed to schools to assist in restoring affected devices.

MOE also noted that students who wish to troubleshoot their devices independently have been given instruction sheets.

The ministry assured that it is working closely with schools to support affected students by providing hardcopy resources and encouraging classmates to share their notes.

MOE confirmed that information on personal learning devices backed up on the cloud has been fully restored.

"There is a small fraction of devices where information stored locally was not backed up and is not recoverable," MOE added.

On 5 August, MOE announced that they would remove the Mobile Guardian app from all students’ devices following a hacking incident that led to the remote wiping of over 10,000 secondary school students' devices.

MOE revealed that it was alerted late Sunday night by schools about some students being unable to access their applications and stored information on their iPads or Chromebooks, which are used as personal learning devices.

Mobile Guardian, the device management app installed on these devices, allows parents to manage students’ usage by restricting applications, websites, and screen time.

According to MOE, Mobile Guardian’s investigation uncovered a “global cybersecurity incident” involving unauthorized access to its platform, affecting customers around the world, including those in Singapore.

This incident marks the second cybersecurity breach involving Mobile Guardian in six months.

In April, the company’s user management portal in Surrey, Britain, was hacked, leading to a data leak of names and email addresses of parents and teachers from five primary schools and 122 secondary schools in Singapore.

Earlier, The Straits Times reported that a glitch in the Mobile Guardian app affected more than 1,000 students from at least five MOE secondary schools.

As early as 30 July, some students experienced issues with their iPads, such as being unable to turn them on or off, while others could not connect to Wi-Fi and received the error message: “Guided Access app unavailable. Please contact your administrator.”

MOE attributed this glitch to a human error in configuration by Mobile Guardian.

Following the recent cybersecurity breach, a Redditor revealed on social media that he had emailed MOE about potential security vulnerabilities as early as two months ago, expressing disappointment over MOE’s lack of action despite multiple emails. Gutzy has contacted MOE and Minister Chan Chun Sing for comment.