Spring Independent School District in Houston, Texas is closed for Thanksgiving week, but I wonder if any of their staff are working anyway in response to a claimed ransomware attack by Egregor threat actors.
There is no date on Egregor’s site to show when they claim to have locked up the district’s files. And they only provided a small amount of proof — an audit from 2011.
Because there is no notice on the district’s site, DataBreaches.net reached out to them to ask them what they were doing in response to the claimed attack, and whether they have notified anyone.
Not surprisingly, no response has been received yet, but this post will be updated when one is received.
At least the district will have FireEye to help them, as the state has contracted with FireEye to provide services to public sector agencies thru a bulk purchase agreement.
Will Spring ISD pay any ransom, though? Other districts in Texas have paid, usually after some negotiation, but I doubt most districts carry enough insurance to cover the kinds of ransom amounts that threat actors demand these days.
Spring ISD is not the only k-12 district to have been hit recently with ransomware. Flying mostly under the radar as yet is a school district in Montana that was allegedly locked up by another group of threat actors. DataBreaches.net made contact with this second district’s school board last weekend and is hoping to get some statement from them. The threat actors did provide some proof of access and exfiltration, but not enough to get any clear sense of how much data — and what kinds – the threat actors may have accessed and exfiltrated.
Expect follow-ups on both of these school districts.