‘How am I going to pass my O-Levels’: Students lose notes due to Mobile Guardian hack

SINGAPORE: When Esther (not her real name) opened her school-issued iPad on Sunday night (Aug 4) to revise for her preliminary examinations the next day, she was shocked to find out that her notes from the last four years of secondary school were gone. 
The Secondary 4 student at Methodist Girls’ School (MGS) was due to sit for her elementary mathematics and English language papers on Monday. 
“How am I going to do my exams? And how am I going to pass my O-Levels in two months?” she told CNA on Monday night. 
“I have all my notes on my iPad and I cannot memorise them anymore.” 
That same morning, the Ministry of Education (MOE) announced that a global cybersecurity breach affected about 13,000 secondary school students from 26 schools in Singapore – they had their devices wiped remotely by a hacker. 
MOE said that the Mobile Guardian application would be removed from all students’ personal learning devices. The app enables parents to manage students’ device usage by restricting applications or websites and screen time. 
The schools alerted the Education Ministry on Sunday night that some students who use iPads or Chromebooks as personal learning devices could not access their apps and information stored in them. 
But issues with some of the devices started last week, students and parents told CNA. At MGS and Raffles Girls School (RGS), some students could not use their iPads to access the internet, and had to factory reset their devices last week, resulting in some students losing their work. 
Since the apps were no longer on the devices, they had no way of recovering their notes because they could no longer be backed up, Esther told CNA. 
“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.” 
Esther is also worried about her performance in the upcoming O-Levels – the written papers start in October. She still has some notes saved on Google Docs, and is relying on her textbooks and tuition notes. 
“I don’t really know what MOE is going to do about (the) O-Levels because all our notes are gone. I’m just really worried about my batch and everybody that is taking the O-Levels this year,” she added. 
After seeing about one-third of her classmates face issues last week, Hailey (not her real name), a student from RGS, thought the situation seemed “quite serious” and decided to back up everything on her device.
While she was working on her math homework on her iPad on Sunday night, she got booted out of the app her school uses for digital worksheets. 
After restarting her device, she realised about half of the apps had disappeared, including the ones she uses for notetaking and homework. 
On Monday, she visited the IT department at her school, only to find an “overwhelming” number of students waiting outside. “They told me to write my name down and wait a while for further instructions,” she told CNA. 
Her friend suggested logging in with her own Apple account and redownloading all the apps. “For me, because I saved it all on iCloud, I was very fortunate to get back all my notes,” she continued. 
“But for some of my classmates who forgot about that, when they redownloaded the apps, all their notes and drawings were all gone. So that’s kind of sad.” 
While she has some physical notes, a large portion of them are on her iPad. “This whole thing is a bit stressful, but I’m just glad I’m able to recover it,” she said, adding that she plans to turn on the auto-backup function in case this happens again. 
Ms Karen Goh, whose daughter is a Secondary 3 student in MGS, described an identical situation, with the school’s IT department facing a two-hour queue last week. 
Her daughter backed up her device last week after seeing her classmates lose their notes. But at about 10pm on Sunday, all the apps that she had downloaded through Mobile Guardian were gone, cutting off accessibility to her notes. 
Like Hailey, her daughter managed to recover most of her notes through her iCloud backup using her personal Apple account.
“There’s a bit of relief there. But I think for students that had the initial problem, the WiFi problem, they probably haven’t gotten to that stage yet,” Ms Goh said. 
“For some people, they’re still quite anxious and worried because they have their exams and written assessments coming up as early as next week.”
Affected students across Singapore were allowed to bring their own devices or laptops from home to use in class on Monday.
MOE said on Monday that efforts are underway to safely restore the devices to normal, and that it was considering other measures to regulate device usage to support learning during this period. 
“MOE is working with schools to support affected students, including deploying additional IT roving teams to schools and providing additional learning resources.”
Mitchell (not his real name), a Secondary 3 student at Riverside Secondary School, said he was working on a history project at 9pm on Sunday night when he noticed his apps disappearing. 
“I was confused and thought this only affected my PLD (personal learning device). However, when I came to school the next day, I saw all my classmates’ iPads and I found out that it actually affected everyone.” 
The school announced that its IT department would be resetting all the devices in batches and help them recover their notes via backup.
“I heard that some students might get unlucky if they don’t backup regularly, and they might lose everything in their PLD,” he said. 
His important notes are in hardcopy “for safety”, but about 70 per cent of his notes are on his iPad. 
“I did lose many priceless things, such as annotations on worksheets that were given throughout the years since I received the PLD,” he said, empathising with O-Level students who now have difficulties revising for their exams. 
Most students could not use their iPads in class on Monday and productivity was “set back by a lot”. Teachers provided them with hardcopy worksheets instead. 
The school also said that they knew some students had lost their notes and would provide additional materials to support them, Mitchell told CNA. 
At Dunman High School, students started facing problems with their Chromebooks on Monday morning. Most websites were locked by Mobile Guardian, with a message that stated there were problems linking their devices, Secondary 3 student Pearlyn (not her real name) told CNA. 
“This resulted in a lot of people from my school being unable to complete a graded project due today, much to a lot of people’s dismay,” she added. 
While it was later made known that Mobile Guardian would be removed from all personal learning devices, most of their devices remain affected by the glitches. 
However, unlike students who have iPads, their files are still saved in the school’s Google Drive, which can be accessed from other devices. 
“My other computer is at home, so it’s not a huge concern for me. But for others, I’m sure it is,” Pearlyn said. 
Her classmates have been using their phones to access their notes, and they were also allowed to submit their graded projects on their phones on Tuesday. 
“It personally doesn’t affect me as much as my notes are pretty much pen and paper notes, but my classmates are indeed worried. They’re hoping the school takes action soon.”