Authorities at the Vermont Law School have spent several weeks and lots of financial resources in order to beef up their digital defense systems against all cyber threats. A cyber attack launched on its database on March 17 of this year, made the law school officials to take up the said measures as a part of the proactive approach.
Getting deep into the details, Sean Lee, the General Manager of Information Technology at Vermont Law School said that his staff is slowly adapting to the new course of getting their digital systems secured.
Briefing about the attack, Sean said that he was alerted of the cyber attack on the early morning of Saturday (March 17) when the alert software installed on the servers started sending unusual errors hinting that the school servers and systems were being assaulted by hackers. Immediately, the team reported the attack to FBI and then started efforts to rebuild the system which took more than 56 hours. And the team succeeded in bringing back the systems to life by the evening of Monday and then decided to go for a security upgrade to avoid all such situations in future.
New software, new hardware, new policies and new business partners were brought into place to forestall a repeat and two independent security firms were asked to investigate the cause of the attack and the consequences it brought in.
On the other hand, FBI established the cyber attack and confirmed that the attack was not initiated by any state-sponsored attackers. It said that no student data such as transcripts and private data were compromised.
As the attempt to access data by hackers was restricted by the IT staff of Vermont Law School on time a major disaster was averted.
For obvious reasons, the law school isn’t ready to disclose the exact cost incurred by this cyber assault. But it says that its insurer has promised to reimburse a partial amount under a cyber liability policy.
