How Ransomware Is Causing Chaos in American Schools

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People often don’t realize that the modern profession of “software engineering” began when NATO demanded we make it a profession in 1968 during what they called a “software crisis.” This gave rise to the 1st general-purpose programming languages like ADA
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How Ransomware Is Causing Chaos in American Schools

A Motherboard investigation based on FOIA requests show how U.S. schools have been dealing with ransomware attacks.
Sierra College was just one of 1,043 schools and colleges—part of 62 school districts and the campuses of 26 colleges and universities—hit by ransomware hackers in 2021, according to Emsisoft, a cybersecurity company that tracks ransomware incidents. The company reports that, so far in 2022, there have been 27 districts with 1,735 schools hit with ransomware.

“Attacks on schools are commonplace for one very simple reason: they’re profitable. Like legitimate businesses, when cybercriminal enterprises hit on a strategy that works well, they’ll repeat it over and over,” Brett Callow, a security researcher at Emsisoft, told Motherboard. “The only way to stop attacks on the education sector is to make them unprofitable, and a big part of that requires bolstering security in schools so that they don’t need to pay.”

Vice Society (no relation to VICE Media), a notorious ransomware gang, has taken credit for nine ransomware hacks against U.S. schools this year, including one earlier this month that hit Los Angeles Unified School District, the second largest district in the United States. The hackers are threatening to release files related to the hack at the end of this week.

Corry Area School District in northwestern Pennsylvania had to make the same decision, as “the district IT staff along with the local police and an outside agency investigated the issue and concluded that the data is not restorable from the servers,” according to emails obtained by Motherboard. “This means that there will be no computer or network access available until further notice.”