Florida-based Manatee County School District has become the latest victim of Cyber Attack. As per our sources, financial info of more than 8000 employees belonging to the School County was stolen through an organized phishing scam launched at the end of last month.
Ron Ciranna, the Deputy Superintendent said that the reports of the hack are true and a probe is still going on.
Officials from the school county say that on January 26th, 2017, one of the school’s payroll employees received an email mimicking to be from the school Superintendent. The email contained the school district letterhead as an attachment and demanded some critical financial info to be forwarded to a specified email ID. The payroll employee immediately reacted to the email and sent the documents related to the 7,900 employees who work for the district.
On February 3rd, 2017, the school officials and the payroll employee discovered that the data forwarded to the email was a part of an organized phishing scam. And the forwarded info contained sensitive data like social security numbers and bank details of the said employees and their contact details.
Thus, the school management decided to partner with an identity theft firm called ‘All Clear ID’ to prevent any kind of untoward incident after the scam.
Manatee County School District has also decided to start training its employees against such phishing scams from early next week.
It is unclear whether the employee who was the actual victim of phishing scam will be penalized or prosecuted as per legal law.
But one of the top officials from the school county said that a detailed probe is still on and if the employee is found guilty of failing to follow some specified security parameters, then he/she will surely be penalized.
More details are awaited and will be updated if necessary!
