At the beginning this week, ransomware spreading hackers locked down the servers of Nantucket Public Schools with the help of file encrypting malware, prompting the school authorities to shut down the schools from Tuesday.
As of the time of this writing, the school authorities could not recover their IT infrastructure from the attack and so announced that they will close the operations of the school on Wednesday for a second day.
Beth Hallett, the school superintendent, asked the staff members and students to stop attending the classes until further notice and announced that a security measure to deter the negative consequences raising from the attack is under way.
Data security experts have been engaged to investigate the incident and restoration of services is underway.
Committee Chair Tim Lepore assured that the law enforcement was investigating the incident and prima facie ruled out the invasion of any state funded attack.
Incidentally, the digital attack took place just within days after the Tucson Unified School District(TUSD) fell prey to a ransomware attack.
Lockbit ransomware gang is suspected to be behind the incident.
Second is the news that belongs to the University of Iowa Hospitals and Clinics. Information is out that a Russian hacking group titled Killnet has disrupted the servers at the said educational institution with a denial of a service attack.
Better Cyber, a cybersecurity firm that keeps a tab of attacks launched on a global note, confirmed that the digital invasion was caused by a Russian government funded organization that is busy in disrupting medical and healthcare institutions.
A distributed denial of service attack aka DDoS attack is a kind of cyber attack where cyber criminals bombard a website server or a corporate server with fake web traffic that in-turn blocks access to the server for the fake traffic.
More details are awaited!
