Singapore’s Ministry of Education (MoE) announced that it will be removing the Mobile Guardian device management application (DMA) from all iPads and Chromebooks following a security breach at the company behind the software.
Mobile Guardian is a platform used by schools to manage and secure students’ learning devices.
According to the Ministry, schools alerted it late on August 4 that several students could not access their applications and information stored on their personal learning devices.
The MoE said it immediately “registered strong concerns” with Mobile Guardian, the company, and later discovered that the application’s developer had been breached, affecting its customers worldwide, including those in Singapore.
“Based on preliminary checks, about 13,000 students from 26 secondary schools had their devices wiped remotely by the perpetrator. There is currently no evidence that the perpetrator had accessed user files,” the MoE said in its statement.
The Ministry clarified that the August 4 incident was not related to earlier technical issues in July, where students had trouble accessing the internet via their learning devices and/or received error messages. As per Mobile Guardian’s investigation, the July incident was due to human error in configuration.
“Efforts are underway to safely restore these devices to normal usage. MoE is considering other mitigating measures to regulate device usage to support learning during this period. We understand that students are naturally concerned and anxious about the incident. MoE is working with schools to support affected students, including deploying additional IT roving teams to schools and providing additional learning resources,” the Ministry further explained.
In April, Mobile Guardian, the company, also had its platform breached, leading to unauthorised access to the names and email addresses of parents and school staff from five primary and 122 secondary schools.
