Stephanie Towers reports: An Upstate school district dealt with an internet outage Tuesday morning. The Pickens County School District said the outages on school and student devices were caused by a Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDOS) attack on servers tasked with running Pickens County School District Online Services. “I want to be clear it wasn’t a DDOS…
Category: Education Sector
Hartford delays first day of school due to ransomware virus
Audrey Conklin reports: Hartford, Conn., public schools postponed the first day of classes Tuesday after a citywide ransomware attack. The malicious attack infiltrated Hartford Public Schools’ critical systems, and those systems could not be completely restored in time for classes to begin on Tuesday. “We have been informed by Metro Hartford Information Services (MHIS), our…
UK: Hackers hold Newcastle Uni student data to ransom
Bobby Hellard reports: Newcastle University is being held to ransom after cyber criminals hacked into its systems at the start of September. The group behind the attack are known as ‘DoppelPaymer’ and have been previously linked to an attack on Elon Musk’s companies SpaceX and Tesla. The attack on the university was reported as a…
Update to Haywood County Schools ransomware attack
There’s an update to the Haywood County Schools ransomware attack previously noted on this site. Lawrence Abrams reports that it was SunCrypt ransomware that was used in the attack, and although the district resumed remote learning on August 31, some school services remain impacted. As part of the double extortion and leak site model that…
Miami high schooler charged with cyberattacks that stopped online learning
Kevin Collier reports: Police have arrested a Florida high school student for alleged cyberattacks that rendered the Miami-Dade school district’s remote learning platform almost impossible to use. The student, an unnamed 16-year-old junior at the South Miami Senior High School, admitted to attacking the school’s My School Online platform, which is designed to let students attend…
Oregon State University reports IT security incident
Oregon State University announced Thursday that personal information of some students and faculty may have been exposed during a recent IT security incident. A cybercriminal accessed an OSU Ecampus server that contained student and faculty directory information such as email addresses, phone numbers and mailing addresses. No social security numbers were compromised in the incident….