WINSLOW — Staff spent Monday morning restoring the Winslow schools website after it was taken off line in a hacking incident on Friday.

The attack “defaced” the Winslow High School website, replacing its normal content with a message from the attacker, Technology Director Will Backman said Monday. While the hack was inconvenient, no sensitive data was exposed to risk, Backman said.

A screen shot shows the Winslow schools website when it was hacked on Friday, April 10. Contributed photo

A screen shot taken Friday shows that the Winslow High School page, which normally features a message from the principal, contact information and video of students, had been replaced with a white background and black text announcing the site had been hacked and defaced by “PHYSX.”

Backman said the administration noticed around midday the website had been hacked and quickly contacted the company that hosts the Winslow sites to take them down temporarily. The website was defaced for about an hour, he said.

A placeholder, with contact numbers and the address of the school, was put in place until staff could restore the regular sites, Backman said.

Winslow schools contract with Rainstorm consulting, an Orono-based website developer, to host its public sites. That puts a safe distance between material the school makes public and confidential data, such as personal information on students and staff, it stores on its own servers.

That way, in the event of an incident like Friday’s attack, there is no way that a hacker can get access to sensitive information through the school’s public website, Backman said.

The schools have likely been attacked before, but this is the first time one of its sites has been obviously defaced, Backman said.

It is unclear if Winslow High School was targeted specifically, but given the massive volume of hacking attempts made on websites, Friday’s incident was more likely a crime of opportunity. Websites are under a “constant barrage” of hacking attempts, Backman said. In a lot of cases, a programmer isn’t even guiding the attacks — a program is just automatically searching for a weakness to exploit.

“You can think about it like a car in a parking lot where every night kids run through trying every door handle until they find one they can get into,” he said.

Peter McGuire — 861-9239

pmcguire@centralmaine.com

Twitter: @PeteL_McGuire