University of Regina students have been notified that a software system used to prevent cheating on exams was hacked.

Associate Vice-President of Information Services, Art Exner says the Proctortrack service was turned off after its parent company’s system was breached.

Exner says while only 10 percent of the U of R’s courses use the service, they are working hard to find a solution.

“The university is one of a large number of institutions that are impacted by the service outage resulting from the decision the company has taken as a reaction to the security breach itself,” said Exner. “We are working hard to manage the impact on the academic operations of the university.”

Exner says that the university has yet to decide on what to do for future exams, but the impact on already written exams should be minimal.

“For the most part, no impact,” said Exner. “The vendors indicated that the breach, based upon the information they have available, did not involve any unauthorized access of student data. So it should be a relatively muted impact on those that were writing exams during the breach itself.”

Exner says that it isn’t the first time a service used by the school has been breached, and they are evaluating the best route forward.

He adds students will receive more information from faculty when it becomes available.