Los Angeles Unified School District, shortly known as LAUSD, was hit by a ransomware attack crippling its IT infrastructure the last weekend. As the school has a pupil strength of 640,000 students enrolled from Kindergarten to Class XII(K-12) the incident seems to be serious, as it might take days or weeks to recover.
The attack badly hit all the email servers, and those meant for communication, prompting the school to inform law enforcement as the attack was launched with criminal intentions.
LAUSD, which was supposed to start fresh from Tuesday this week, is busy recovering from the incident after a long weekend. FBI and a forensic firm have been urged to investigate the incident deep as the White House has taken the matter up.
The school staff is putting the full effort to function the school normally and the teaching staff is also ready to support the classes.
Coming to the other news, UK-based transport operator ‘GoAhead’ is also facing digital disruption for the past couple of days and prima facie reveals that the disruption could have been caused by unauthorized network access by an individual or a group.
As of now, no customer data was compromised in the incident- as per the IT staff of ‘Go Ahead’ and they suspect that the attack could have been launched on the servers at the start of the long weekend.
Driver rostering and other software-based services were hit by the attack and experts believe it might take at least a fortnight to recover fully from the cyber attack.
Unconfirmed sources report that the attack could be of a ransomware variant nature and currently, the bus operator is experiencing downtime across London, the North East, and South East of England.
