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NJ School District Hit With Ransomware-For-Bitcoins Scheme

Posted by timothy on from the so-is-there-a-downside? dept.

An anonymous reader sends news that unidentified hackers are demanding 500 bitcoins, currently worth about $128,000, from administrators of a New Jersey school district. Four elementary schools in Swedesboro-Woolwich School District, which enroll more than 1,700 students, are now locked out of certain tasks: "Without working computers, teachers cannot take attendance, access phone numbers or records, and students cannot purchase food in cafeterias. Also, [district superintendent Dr. Terry C. Van Zoeren] explained, parents cannot receive emails with students grades and other information." According to this blog post from security company BatBlue, the district has been forced to postpone the Common Core-mandated PARCC state exams, too. Small comfort: "Fortunately the Superintendent told CBS 3’s Walt Hunter the hackers, using a program called Ransomware, did not access any personal information about students, families or teachers." Perhaps the administrators can take heart: Ransomware makers are, apparently, starting to focus more on product support; payment plans are probably on the way.

2 of 167 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Disaster Recovery? by slashmydots · · Score: 2, Informative

    In case you're not familiar, let me give you the breakdown. The worst educated, fat, smoking, abrasive personality, asshole nurses work at kidney dialysis places. That's simply where the worst possible employees end up from that career field. The worst IT workers end up at schools. It's low pay and higher demand than corporate environments, the budget is a joke, and they're perpetually understaffed. So you get some clueless moron who can't hold down a real job working as the IT administrator at any given school.

  2. Run as user AND back-ups by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Informative

    All these problems could be prevented by-
    1. Running as a low privileged user, NOT administrator with root powers. Might be tough on Windows, but so is having all your computer ransomed.
    2. Back-ups of vital data. If you have paroper back-ups, nuke the disks and reinstall, or restore images and back-ups of the files.

    Windows encourages bad practices. Did you ever see a ready build PC with all the data on a separate derive or partition? No, they make it so a re-install makes you lose all your data.