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It was bad enough that a cyberattack disrupted classes at Okanagan College’s campuses two weeks ago, but now thousands of students also have to cope with the added stress of knowing their personal information may be in the hands of villains.

“As someone who was on the outside, I didn’t worry too too much until I got the email that there was a breach of information and all this vital information was gone,” Jennifer Gullins, executive chairperson for Okanagan College Student Union, told iNFOnews.ca.

“It just feels a bit of a betrayal. I don’t know if that word is too extreme but we don’t know what’s going on behind the scenes.”

The cyberattack was discovered on Jan. 9, which was the first day of classes for the current semester for about 8,000 full-time equivalent students throughout the Okanagan. The attack has made all manner of communications difficult, including efforts by iNFOnews.ca to get information.

Students were aware something was seriously wrong before they got an email notification from the college.

READ MORE: Okanagan College crippled by cyberattack

“I went to school and there was no internet,” Gullins said. “Students were scrambling to find their classrooms because they couldn’t access the online portal to see where their classes were. They were just wandering the halls.”

Some professors put signs on their doors but they had no way of contacting their students.

Gullins had the advantage of being a returning student so she, at least, knew which building to go to for her philosophy class.

She also took a screenshot of her schedule a few days earlier so she had the room numbers.

But her professor didn’t have access to the college’s internal system so she was only able to give a bit of an outline for the course to the sparsely populated class. Normally course outlines and material are online.

“What was supposed to be a one-and-a-half hour class, was a half-hour class,” Gullins said.

The first week of classes is a crucial time for students to add and delete classes in an effort to balance school with work and study time.

Now, two weeks later, students are being told they will have to read up extra on their own time because there won’t be enough time to cover everything in the classroom.

“That was really really hard on them – to not be able to change their schedule, to not be able to see what classes were available to move to and then having to reach out to different contacts that they wouldn’t normally have to reach out to,” Gullins said. “What normally would take maybe half an hour, adding and dropping a class, was taking days, weeks.”

New students also didn’t know to contact their professors or deans for help – if they could find them. They often didn’t know their fellow students so had no one to ask about courses or classroom numbers.

Things are still chaotic this week.

Email and internet access is erratic and, when phoning through the new switchboard, it is hit and miss whether the call will go through.

To top it all off, students were sent an email Monday, Jan. 23, telling them personal information, including social insurance and passport numbers, may have been hacked.

READ MORE: IDENTITY THEFT: Okanagan College warns students personal information may have been hacked

Students who are Canadian citizens are being asked to sign in to the myTrueIdentity credit monitoring site.

“A lot of students, they have to get their schedule planned out where: ‘I have this block for studying, this chunk for working and I go from school to work and I have an hour here for studying and an hour here for studying,’” Gullins said. “Their spare time is minimal. So, instead of being able to apply themselves to their courses, they’ve been having to find all that extra time to figure out what the heck’s going on.”

That’s particularly tough for foreign students where English is their second language so it’s extra difficult just wading through the long and technical explanations from the college.

Gullins has nothing but praise for the efforts the IT department is putting in to deal with the fallout of the cyberattack.

“I swear I see more grey hairs popping up every day on them,” she said.

Still, there's nowhere near enough staff to deal with the need students have for information.

She also appreciates the detailed explanations the college is providing in its periodic updates but after the latest revelation about the compromised data, she has questions.

“You do wonder whether they did the best that they could, whether they should have done better,” Gullins said. “It’s just tiring having to now do more and more things to protect ourselves in an already busy time of year when we weren’t given a heads up that, hey, there are some things you might need to do to protect your identity or your personal information.”

And she, along with her peers, are worried about the possibility of identity theft.

“I’m a domestic student,” she said. “If something did happen to my SIN number, as much as it would be a massive headache, I would be able to navigate the systems in place so much easier than someone coming from a different country whose second language is English. If something were to happen to their passport number or whatnot and they have to go through an external system, that would be worse than a headache.”

For more information about the data breach and what Okanagan College is doing about it, go here.

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