Recently, a few representatives of the North East Independent School District, in Texas, have reported that lots of their school campuses have been hit by ransomware infections which have been plaguing USA and many other countries worldwide.
The local TV station KENS5 reported that the ransomware infections have happened during the past two months and affected two of the school district’s departments, and 20 school campuses.
Any information on what type of ransomware hit these institutions is still missing. According to the school officials, the ransomware infections locked around 2.5 TB of information in total.
Fortunately, the affected schools were running professional backup software and managed to recover all their files without paying the ransom.
“Our technology department was able to work very quickly and delete all the encrypted files and use backup data to get them going again,” a school district spokesperson explained.
Unfortunately, the cases with some previous infections were rather different. Then the ransomware affected hospitals, schools, churches, and even courthouses, most of which have significantly more funds than a school in Texas.
The above-mentioned institutions had to pay the hackers’ ransom demands because they didn’t have the practical sense to back up their files regularly.
Considering the malicious threat, the US and Canadian authorities issued an official cyber-alert, based on the increasing ransomware infections during the past months.
