Mintie Betts reports:
Athens ISD Board of Trustees has agreed to pay a $50,000 ransom for school data that was taken in a criminal ransomware attack.
The attack targeted data stored on district servers, backup systems, and hundreds of computers. As a result, access to data has been blocked including teacher communications, student schedules, grades, and assignments.
Read more on EastTexasMatters.com.
The report doesn’t indicate what type of ransomware or group of attackers, but this district paying ransom that became publicly known will not help other districts who may also be attacked. I realize that there is required transparency that applies to school boards and use of public funds, but I’m simply acknowledging that publicizing payments encourages more attacks. The leaks site for the AKO ransomware operators is currently unavailable, but if memory serves, they had also claimed to have hit a school district in Texas and had threatened to dump data “soon” but had not dumped it.