Shawn R. Beals reports: The Middletown school district is working to restore access to its computer systems after discovering a ransomware virus Thursday that had locked the staff out. Ransomware is a type of computer virus that encrypts data, rendering it unusable. Typically, the virus demands a ransom payment in order to have access restored….
Category: Education Sector
Notre Dame de Namur University notifying financial aid applicants of data security incident
Notre Dame de Namur University is notifying some financial aid applicants that their information may have been compromised when an employee fell prey to a phishing attack. In its notification letter (reproduced below), Henry Roth, the Chief Financial Officer and VP of Administration, writes that the university learned of the possible compromise on May 18. Investigation…
Ie: South Eastern Regional College staff’s personal data at risk after email hack
The Belfast Telegraph reports: A data breach at one of Northern Ireland’s largest further education colleges has put the personal and financial data – including bank account numbers and sort codes – of hundreds of staff at risk. Staff at the South Eastern Regional College (SERC) learned about the massive security breach yesterday in a…
UK: Sacked IT technician who hacked former school sentenced
Eagle Radio reports: A former employee of a private school in Leatherhead has been found guilty of a number of cyber-crime offences investigated by Surrey Police. Donald Bart-Williams was sacked from his role in the IT department at St Johns School, but used his specialist skills and knowledge to hack into the school system and…
Education Scotland order hard reset on school social networking app following major security breach
Derek Healey reports: Education Scotland is facing “very difficult questions” after being forced to order a hard reset of all passwords across its national digital learning platform following a major security breach. An email distributed to headteachers and seen by The Courier has revealed how management called for all log-ins to be scrapped after it…
AU: University of New South Wales loses data after IBM storage failure
Julian Bajkowski reports: UNSW students are facing the prospect that some information saved to the university’s online storage has been lost for good after a 16 hour-long outage this month blamed on IBM. “Regrettably, some students may have lost some data in the outage,” UNSW said in a statement to students. The statement advised that…