GoKawiilA former IT employee at an Iowa school district was sentenced to 21 months in prison for conducting a prolonged cyberattack against the former employer that disrupted classroom operations, deleted accounts, and caused tens of thousands of dollars in damages.
According to court documents, Ezekiel Dean Potter, 34, previously worked as a senior IT support specialist for the Saydel Community School District in Des Moines from May 2022 through April 2023.
Prosecutors say that after his employment ended, Potter retained access credentials and repeatedly targeted the district’s systems over the next 21 months.
"For over a year and a half, Defendant was a plague on the Saydel Community School District," the U.S. government said in a sentencing memorandum.
"He deleted SCSD’s Facebook page, stripped its employees of access to educational platforms and accounts, and tried again and again to reset its employees’ usernames and passwords for various other platforms and accounts."
Prosecutors said the attacks caused widespread disruption to the school district, impaired its ability to teach students, and resulted in tens of thousands of dollars in remediation costs.
Court documents state the attacks began shortly after Potter left the district, when Saydel's Facebook account was deleted.
Prosecutors say Potter later targeted the district's Apple School Manager account, deleting user accounts, passwords, phone numbers, billing information, and device management server data.
This effectively prevented school employees from accessing the Apple School Manager platform and disabled management of district MacBooks and iPads for roughly a week while staff worked with Apple to recover access.
The district also experienced unauthorized access attempts against its GoDaddy account and other online services.
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