Jana Hollingsworth reports:
The Proctor school district was hit by a malicious computer software “ransomware” attack last weekend.
Student data and payroll information were not affected, said superintendent John Engelking, but some information kept in Microsoft Word files has been locked away by the hacker. Only computers at the middle and high school were affected, and only those that were left on over the weekend.
The district has not yet notified authorities, but it has hired a forensic data company to deal with the hacker, who hasn’t yet requested an amount of money. The district won’t pay it, Engelking said. The hired company’s job is to find “patient zero,” or the computer that initially was attacked, and write a code to release the data.
Read more on Duluth News Tribune. The report doesn’t reveal how the attackers were able to inject the ransomware, and since the district says that only computers “left on over the weekend” were affected, how did that happen?