Clint Lalonde, Director Open Education BCcampus 

On Friday, May 23, Simon Fraser University (SFU), host of our Pressbooks sites, alerted BCcampus that they had detected evidence of a server compromise affecting both opentextbc.ca and pressbooks.bccampus.ca.

The servers were immediately taken offline for investigation, and BCcampus and SFU IT staff worked tirelessly over the weekend to rebuild the servers and restore a backup version of Pressbooks. SFU then completed a full security audit on the new servers. On Tuesday, May 27, after confirming the sites were secure, both sites were brought back online. No personal information was compromised during this event, and no content was lost in the restoration. 

We realize this outage disrupted access to textbooks and resources that many educators rely on, and we sincerely apologize for the inconvenience. For the past thirteen years, BCcampus has run Pressbooks as a self-hosted service without a major incident—thanks to the dedication of our small IT team and our partners at SFU. While this was a significant disruption, we are grateful SFU identified the issue early and no serious damage occurred.  

In response to this incident, we are reviewing our procedures for managing Pressbooks and the B.C. Open Collection. This includes updating our policies for responding to major service disruptions and improving our communication and support processes to ensure timely, clear, updates for users.  

Thank you for your ongoing support for open education at BCcampus.