Google meets have taken over the lives of all Region 16 students during the pandemic that reshaped our education this year. It helped shape distance learning and assist teachers so they can teach their classes virtually with ease. Google meets are secure and effective, although it doesn’t mean that they are impenetrable from hackers getting into the system.

The grief of Google Meets started on the first day of the 2020 school year, September 1, and continued sporadically for the rest of that week. Inappropriate audio being played into the classes, which contained profanity, and rogue participants interrupting classes plagued several Google Meets. 

“I’m concerned about anything that disrupts the learning environment for our students,” said Matthew Brennan, Region 16 Technology Director. “Both students and teachers are challenged in unconventional ways working in a distance learning environment and it’s unfortunate that someone would purposefully make it harder for everyone.”

The person that hacked into these classrooms was not identified when the incident was investigated. Although Brennan said it was shown that, “The two main incident types we’ve had to deal with were impersonating another user by logging in with their credentials and using dial-in numbers to gain access to a meeting.” Brennan was able to find an immediate fix for the issue, although it does come with downsides. 

The dial-in option that they found as a fix would have been helpful for connectivity issues with students, but they aren’t able to use it any longer to help prevent the hacking of classrooms.

Although losing the option is unfortunate, this was the only side effect to the hacks. “Overall I do not think it had that much of an impact. After the initial rash of incidents, things have mostly gone back to normal,” said Brennan. “In terms of its impact on learning, it’s a relatively minor irritation, not rising to the level of the occasional Google Drive outages we’ve had to endure.”

Brennan has done his best to protect Region 16’s students’ ability to learn with Google Meet. They want to discover who was the cause of these incidents and how to reduce future occurrences. The issue was passed into the hands of the WRHS administration, for them to decide the following steps. Along with that, there have been no more reports of hacking into the Google Meets and distance learning has gone back to normal.