SAGINAW (WWJ) - A "coordinated attack" on a popular messaging app used by parents and teachers in the Tri City area saw an explicit photo sent to families last week.
St. Charles Community Schools in Saginaw County were among those targeted in the attack on Sept. 13 through Seesaw, an educational app used to connect students, partners and teachers, officials said via NBC 25.
The Saginaw Intermediate School District said they immediately shut down the app when they were made aware that an inappropriate image was circulating to parents at their schools.
In addition to Michigan, schools in Illinois, Colorado, Kansas, Minnesota, New York, South Dakota and other states also received the NSFW image, which NBC News reported was a meme “infamous on the internet” that showed a man “engaged in an explicit act.”
Seesaw, a San Francisco-based company, said in a news release that the social media platform was not hacked, but they believe accounts of the app were accessed using compromised email-password combinations.
“We have no evidence to suggest this attacker performed additional actions or accessed data in Seesaw beyond logging in and sending a message from these compromised accounts.”
St. Charles Community Schools Superintendent, Mark Benson, told NBC 25 that the district had only been using the app for the last couple of years.
While the school district said it was overall happy with how Seesaw handled the attack, Benson said he hope more safeguards are put in place to prevent incidents like this from happening in the future.
“We just rely on them that they will assure that they have the proper protocols, whether doing a two step verifications, or different programs that they use to make sure that that they can't be hacked," said Benson said via NBC 25.
Seesaw said only 5% of their users were affected by the attack and temporarily disabled the messaging feature when they became aware of the incident.
The company urged all users to change their passwords on the app to something unique and keep it different from passwords used on other online sites.
In the meantime, St, Charles Community Schools has gone back to using Seesaw.
According to the company's website, “over 10 million teachers, students, and family members every month across more than 75% of schools in the U.S."
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