Haywood County School’s online classes were severely disrupted on Monday this week because of a ransomware attack on the servers hosting the academic information. And news is out that the management has suspended the classes for Tuesday and most probably Wednesday, or until the data is recovered through backups.
School Superintendent Dr. Bill Nolte has confirmed the news and stated that Haywood County School’s online classes will be back once the malware is contained.
Mr. Nolte also confirmed that the school management has no plans to pay the hackers in return of the decryption key and might do it as a last resort only if they are not left with options. He assured that no data such as social security numbers and contact info was compromised in the incident.
Around 3 Cybersecurity experts have been hired to mitigate the risks arisen from the cyber attack and to frame up the further action plan.
Similarly, the remote learning classes for around 25K students belonging to Rialto Unified School District were also suspended on Friday last week because of a ransomware incident, and school authorities are worried that it might have spread to the laptops given to students.
However, Syeda Jafri confirmed that no data related to the students or the school staff belonging to K-12 or Pre- K12 was compromised in the incident and the online classes have been suspended until further notice.
The third incident related to ransomware and trending on Google belongs to TFI International Canpar Express. Reports are in that the hackers who launched a ransomware attack on the parcel delivery company have now chosen to sell the files on the dark web.
DopplePaymer Ransomware gang appears to be behind the incident and unconfirmed reports say that the group that targeted high profile targets so far including city of Knoxville and NASA IT contractor has resorted to the incident as the victim denied paying a ransom.
Brett Callow, the threat analysts from Emsisoft says that the Montréal based TFI has only one option left, and that is to sit down without paying the ransom and see the stolen files leaked on the dark web or pay the ransom in exchange for a decryptor.
