Ministry of Education to remove Mobile Guardian app from all student devices after hack; no evidence files accessed

SINGAPORE – The Mobile Guardian app will be removed from all student education devices after a global cybersecurity breach affected 13,000 students from 26 secondary schools in Singapore.

The Ministry of Education (MOE) said in a statement on August 5 that the app would be removed from all iPads and Chromebooks as a precaution and that work was underway to safely return the devices to normal use.

Mobile Guardian is a device management app that helps parents control their children’s device usage by limiting screen time and access to specific websites and apps.

The Ministry of Education said that late on the evening of August 4, some schools reported that some students using iPads or Chromebooks were unable to access apps and information stored on their devices.

Investigations conducted by Mobile Guardian have revealed that a cybersecurity incident involving unauthorised access to the platform has occurred, affecting customers worldwide, including those in Singapore, the MOE said.

Due to the data breach, the affected students’ devices were remotely wiped, MOE said, with no evidence that student files were accessed.

“We understand that students are naturally concerned and anxious about the incident. MOE is working with schools to support affected students, including sending additional IT teams to schools and providing additional educational resources,” the ministry said.

The Ministry of Education said the security incident on August 4 has nothing to do with the earlier technical issues that students had to face in late July 2024.

The Straits Times newspaper reported earlier that more than 1,000 students from at least five secondary schools under the Education Ministry were affected by the Mobile Guardian app bug.

As early as July 30, some students reported that they were unable to turn their iPads on or off, while others were unable to connect to Wi-Fi and received an error message: “The Guided Access app is unavailable. Please contact your administrator.”

According to MOE, the cause of the fault was human error in the configuration of Mobile Guardian.

In a statement posted on its website on August 5, Mobile Guardian said that since the security incident, “servers have been taken down to prevent further damage from the perpetrator.”

Mobile Guardian said it received a notification of suspicious activity on its platform at 10pm Singapore time on August 4 and detected unauthorised access to its system.

The company said it is currently investigating the breach, which has affected users across the world, including in the United States, Europe and Singapore.

“This resulted in a small percentage of devices being deregistered from Mobile Guardian and having their content remotely wiped,” Mobile Guardian reported.

Users should contact their local IT administrator or IT department to reactivate their device, Mobile Guardian reported.

This is the second cybersecurity incident involving Mobile Guardian in six months.

In April, Mobile Guardian’s user management portal at its headquarters in Surrey, UK, was hacked, exposing the names and email addresses of parents and teachers at five primary schools and 122 secondary schools in Singapore.

Parents The Straits Times spoke to said they were at a loss because their children had lost notes and assignments from their school years. Some students also had no warning that their devices would be completely wiped.

One mother, who wanted to be known only as Madam Chan, said her 15-year-old daughter at Raffles Girls’ School reported problems with the device as early as July 31. However, the school did not provide any details on the exact nature of the problem.

The 59-year-old, who works in human resources, said the school informed students on Aug. 1 that their devices would have to undergo a factory reset, a process that erases all data and settings from the device and restores them to their default settings.

“This process led to several students losing their notes, even though the school said students should find a solution to back up their notes before doing a factory reset,” she said. However, many students, including her daughter, were unable to back up their devices due to connectivity issues, and ended up losing some of their notes anyway.

Some other students’ notes have already been deleted due to technical issues that occurred in late July.

Some parents, including Madam Chan herself, said they planned to go to the Apple Store to get them to uninstall the app. Madam Chan said her daughter was too scared to turn on the device, fearing she would lose more notes.

“Many parents, like me, are frustrated and don’t know what to do,” she said. “Our biggest concern is getting our kids back their notes, as well as all their assignments and digital drawings they’ve done over the years.”

Ms Chan said other parents on the RGS Year 3 parents’ WhatsApp chat group, which has about 290 members, said only 50 meetings were available per day for the school’s IT department, with some students having to wait three to four hours for help with their devices, they said.

“This situation is very stressful in every way,” she said. She added that each situation is different for each student and there are no clear instructions on what they can do to back up their devices.

Another parent, who wanted to be known only as Mr Alex, said that at St Andrew’s Secondary School, many students took photos of documents on their phones to save notes before going to the IT department to factory reset their devices.

“As a parent, I am very nervous as this is unnecessarily distracting for the boys and could disrupt their revision for their final assessment,” said a parent in his 40s who has a son at the school.

“A lot of their work is done on their personal learning device,” he said. “On the other hand, I’m happy to use it as a learning point to teach my son about his inherent weakness of relying on technology.”

Mr Alex said students who had saved their notes on external sites like Google were safe from the glitch, but for others years of notes would be deleted due to the reset.

Another parent of a 13-year-old son attending Nan Hua Secondary School said: “Parents are not sure how we can help our children.”

“We wasted a lot of time trying to pinpoint the exact cause of the problem,” said the 52-year-old housewife, who wanted to be known only as Madam Lee.

She expressed concerns about whether removing the Mobile Guardian app was a permanent or temporary solution, and whether children would be free to download other apps without supervision in the meantime.

Ms Lee said her son’s device has been faulty since July 31 and that it was scheduled to be formatted on August 5.

“We don’t really know if the hack that happened last night caused any further damage or if it didn’t affect the device at all because it was already causing problems to begin with,” she said.

Apart from Mobile Guardian, another device management app that MOE uses is Blocksi, which is based in California, United States.

The Straits Times has contacted the Singapore Cyber ​​Security Agency and the Ministry of Energy for further information.