Yazoo County School District in Mississippi is said to have become a victim of a ransomware attack in the first week of October this week. And the school authorities realized the incident on October 12,2020.
Dr. Ken Barron, the superintendent, confirmed the news, but failed to acknowledge how the file encrypting malware entered the school district’s network.
The said Mississippi School District took the help of a third party Cybersecurity company to probe the incident and later reportedly paid $300,000 to free up the data from the pangs of those who inducted the malware into their network.
Dr. Barron said that all the affected individuals will be notified about the incident if the law in the state says to do so. The Yazoo County School District is said to have deployed advanced Cybersecurity tools to avoid such incidents in the future.
In what is known to Cybersecurity Insiders, Cafeteria transactions, staff salary information, fire alarm, and burglary systems weren’t impacted in the ransomware attack.
Note 1- In November last year, FBI has released a press statement urging the ransomware victims not to pay any ransom. As it not only encourages the crime but also doesn’t guaranty an exchange of decryption key for the ransom.
Note 2- In some cases, when there is no data backup, then there is only one option left for the victims and that is to pay up to the demands put forward by those spreading the ransomware. And in either case, the individual whose database was locked down from access will be the looser.
Note 3- Taking the data backups on a regular note that keep the data continuity intact, and installing threat monitoring/ detection solutions, never opening email attachments when sent by unknown people, downloading applications from trusted resources and keeping the device software up to date with updates solves curb such crime instances, say security experts.
