Remote Education: Computer Viruses

(asked on 21st January 2021) - View Source

Question to the Department for Education:

To ask the Secretary of State for Education, what assessment he has made of the risks posed by laptops infected with the gamarue virus provided by his Department to the (a) privacy, (b) safeguarding and (c) security of children, young people and their families using those laptops; and what assessment he has made of the potential risk of the transmission of that virus to other devices and households.


Answered by
Nick Gibb Portrait
Nick Gibb
This question was answered on 27th January 2021

To date, the Department has received reports of the presence of a software virus on 33 laptops out of 800,000 devices provided to schools. The virus was detected as part of the setup of the device by the schools before they were passed to pupils.

The first notification of an issue was on 7 January 2021, with further notifications in the 3 weeks after, up to the 22 January. The windows laptops affected were ones where the school had chosen to set up the device themselves, rather than accept a Department for Education build.

In all known cases, the virus was automatically detected and removed immediately by the included antivirus software during the installation process.

The Department have been in constant contact with suppliers and relevant parties to understand and resolve this issue, and firmly believe this is a contained incident which we are dealing with at pace.

All devices without a Department for Education build are provided by the supplier from the point of manufacture directly to the school. The Department are reliant upon schools accepting the responsibility to install and configure any new devices in line with advice and guidance provided by both the Department and the National Cyber Security Centre.

In no circumstances should there be an occurrence of any child receiving a device that has not been securely and properly set up. Once the device is issued to a pupil, the ongoing risks associated with privacy, safeguarding and security of those devices and its users is entirely based upon how the schools and Local Authorities manage them.

The Department takes online safety and security extremely seriously. Any schools that have concerns about devices should contact the support desk at: https://get-help-with-tech.education.gov.uk.

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