Office aims to prevent future attacks from interrupting provincewide testing

Last Thursday, schools (and maybe a few students) were frustrated when they were unable to login into the Ontario Secondary School Literacy Test (OSSLT), the standardized test for Ontario high school students.

Turns out, the Education Quality and Accountability Office (EQAO) now says, it was the victim of a cyberattack.

In a news release today, the EQAO said the cause of the technical issues that resulted in the cancellation of the Oct. 20 provincewide trial of the online OSSLT was “an intentional, malicious and sustained Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack,” which is a type of cyberattack.

EQAO said an extremely large volume of traffic from a vast set of IP addresses around the globe was targeted at the network hosting the online test. The high volume of traffic effectively blocked legitimate users from accessing the test.

The person or group behind the cyberattack remains unknown, the office said.

The EQAO is now working to see how to prevent similar incidents in the future.

The office said it did conduct early field and load tests on the new system in the run up to last Thursday’s wide-scale trial with students. Despite the attack, EQAO said it’s confident future tests can be successfully completed using the online assessment model.