The most recent attack victimized the Gadsden Independent School District in February. Computer servers, internet, phones, and email service across all 24 schools were locked out, said district spokesman Luis Villalobos.
Technicians are now “scrubbing and reloading about 8,000 individual devices throughout the system — they have to start from scratch and reboot the entire system on each device,” he said. “It’s a daunting task and a major inconvenience bordering on a disaster.”
And it’s the second time it’s happened to the district.
The most likely cause was a computer that had been infected in the previous July ransomware attack and was reconnected to the network without first having been checked by the technology department, Villalobos said.
No payroll, personnel, or student data was compromised. The full cost of the recent attack is not yet known, but restoration after the previous attack took four months and set the district back about $1.9 million, he said.
Often, the hackers seek a ransom to be paid in some form of cryptocurrency, which is commonly used on the “dark web” to purchase things that may be illegal,…
