Hackers remotely wipe 13,000 students’ iPads and Chromebooks after breaching safety software

Mobile Guardian, a company that specializes in providing security software for devices in education institutions, announced on Monday it suffered a “security incident” over the weekend which involved “unauthorized access” to those devices.

Customers have been affected on a global basis, including in North America, Europe, and, particularly egregiously, in the high-tech city-state of Singapore.

As proudly trumpeted on Mobile Guardian’s website, the company’s services are used by Singapore’s Ministry of Education (MoE) to protect all of the iPads and Chromebooks used by students in the country’s secondary schools.

The company, which has offices in both the United Kingdom and South Africa, confirmed that the “unauthorized access” resulted in “a small percentage of devices to be unenrolled from Mobile Guardian and their devices wiped remotely.”

Singapore’s MoE confirmed “based on preliminary checks, about 13,000 students in Singapore from 26 secondary schools had their devices wiped remotely by the perpetrator.”

It is not yet known whether other schools and enterprise customers have been similarly affected by the security incident, nor what effect the wiping will have on education in Singapore.

The country’s MoE said it was “working with schools to support affected students, including deploying additional IT roving teams to schools and providing additional learning resources.”

In addition, the government department stated it had “immediately registered strong concerns” with Mobile Guardian, and as a precaution would be removing the company’s software from students’ devices.

Mobile Guardian said it discovered the incident on 4 August, and effectively took its own platform down to prevent any further access.

“We understand how critical Mobile Guardian is to our educational institutions and we are fully committed to rectifying this issue,” the company stated. “We want to express our deepest apologies for any inconvenience this will have caused.”