The website students use to manage their BC student loans appears to have been taken over.
On Sunday evening, the site, studentaidbc.ca, was replaced with a black screen with green text, seeming to be linked to a group of hackers’ profiles on a Persian-language webpage. Music plays in the background.
The website appears to have been hacked by RT3N of a group called the Guardiran Security Team, showing revolving statements such as, “Game Over for you but My Game has Just Begun,” “When there is no justice, There is just us” and “Mess with the best, die like the rest.”
It’s not clear whether any of the site’s systems have been compromised beyond the frontend.
By 9:30 p.m., the website began returning an error message.
The StudentAid BC website is temporarily unavailable as we work to resolve an issue affecting multiple government websites.
— StudentAid BC (@studentaidbc) May 3, 2021
StudentAidBC’s Twitter account tweeted about the incident on Monday morning, writing that the website is “temporarily unavailable as we work to resolve an issue affecting multiple government websites.”
In a statement sent Monday morning, a spokesperson from the Ministry of Advanced Education & Skills Training said the ministry and the Office of the Chief Information Officer are investigating the issue.
“At this time, we are not aware of any personal data being compromised. We have taken immediate steps to mitigate any further exposure. This includes temporarily shutting down affected websites while we work with our IT staff to resolve the issue.”
The Ministry confirmed on May 6 that no data had been compromised.
This is a developing story and will be updated when more information is available.