On Monday, June 29, 2026 Salida School District was impacted by a cyber attack against its network that began at approximately 6:30 a.m. By 8:30 a.m. the attack was identified, and all systems were shut down while the District reached out for guidance by specialists to investigate the extent of the incident and work to restore the system safely. 

The attack was reported to law enforcement and an investigation is ongoing. It appears that no information or data was accessed or extracted. This is a significant success, which would not have been possible two years ago when the IT department worked on several substantial upgrades to the District’s network and infrastructure. These updates protected employee and student information, preventing information from being accessed or extracted. 

Some devices that were active on the network during the attack experienced damage to the files stored on hard drives, impacting the Central Office’s work flow this week. Some damaged files will not be able to be recovered. Cloud based systems were not impacted by the attack and are functioning normally. 

The District continues to evaluate and upgrade systems to provide the best cybersecurity possible. This event speeds up the timeline for several updates that were already being considered. The disruption to operations was unfortunate and inconvenient, however, the recent improvements to the IT infrastructure prevented more substantial impacts to the District.

IT is working diligently to develop a safe go-forward plan to evaluate all district devices to ensure they are all ready to go before the start of the 26-27 school year and will be reaching out to staff members. Any staff member who has questions should reach out to their supervisor or to IT before turning on their computer (desktop or laptop).