KENS reports:
The Northeast Independent School District says it’s been hit by the latest craze in computer viruses known as ransomware. It is a type of malware or virus that limits users from accessing parts of their system, typically forcing the victim to pay some type of ransom in order to get their data back.
In this case, the district says that they didn’t have to do that.
[…]
“As far as we know, there was no sensitive information that could have been compromised,” NEISD spokesperson Aubrey Chancellor said. “There was just really a small amount of data lost.”
The district says that there were three separate ransomware incidents over the past two months. All of 20 campuses and two departments were affected. About 2.5 terabytes of data were encrypted, but no personal information about any student was compromised.
“Our technology department was able to work very quickly and delete all the encrypted files and use back up data to get them going again,” Chancellor said.
Read more on KENS. It’s really nice to see that public school districts had good backups and were able to handle the attacks without paying ransom and without losing sensitive information – or even a lot of information.