Northshore School District Washington was reportedly hit by a cyberattack on Friday last week i.e September 20th,2019. Highly placed sources say that the attack was a ransomware variant which locked down access to student and staff related data.
As an abundance of caution, the phone communication systems including voice mail and email servers were shut down to contact the cyber incident.
There is no evidence that information related to the staff and students was accessed by hackers. But the staff admitted that the data was in an encrypted form and would take a lot of time to go through data recovery.
The Washington based school district which covers Bothell, Woodinville, and Kenmore along with some portions of both King County and Snohomish County have urged the parents of the students to contact them physically at the school desk.
ParentVue and StudentVue apps & web portal are not accessible as of now and might need some more time for service restoration.
Note 1-Ransomware is a kind of malware which encrypts a database until a ransom is paid to hackers. FBI has warned the ransomware victims against paying a ransom to the threat actors as it not only propels the crime but doesn’t guaranty the return of the decryption key for freeing up the database from the malware.
Note 2- Established in 1959, the Northshore School District consists of students pursuing K-12 grades and works with the motto of “Strengthening our community through excellence in Education”. With a student count of 22,000, the school district is exactly located in Bothell, Washington 98021, United States.
Note 3- Currently, the disruption of Northshore School District servers due to ransomware is yet to be officially confirmed.
