WBTW reports that a South Carolina school district is paying a ransom demand because they have no way to access 25 servers with elementary school data after their system was locked up by ransomware:
The Horry County school system remains locked out of several servers after a ransom computer virus got into the system last week.
Charles Hucks is the executive director of technology for Horry County Schools, he’s had non-stop 20 hour days this past week to try to restore locked up data. The virus was discovered last Monday. Servers were immediately shut down to stop the malware from spreading further, and that did interrupt some online services.
Hucks says HCS was not targeted to gain access to data, but a high-level encryption was used to lock up the data on the schools’ servers. As far as they can tell, nothing was stolen or removed, and staff and student information is safe.
Hucks says they have been able to back up most of the lost data, but 25 servers with information for elementary schools are still encrypted with no way to get in.
“And the only way we’ll get it back is to pay,” said Hucks.
Read more on WBTW.
Restore from a backup? You backup your servers, right?