Page 11 - Campus Technology, March/April 2020

:: IT Managment
CYBERSECURITY
When
Ransomware
Strikes
While there’s no playbook for the best way to handle ransomware, the responses of these latest institutional victims offer lessons worth remembering.
Alabama’s Wallace State Community College, Niagara University in New York, Pennsylvania’s Butler County Community College, Missouri’s Three Rivers College, Lakeland Community College in Ohio, ITI Technical College in Louisiana. These are the first known higher education victims of ransomware for 2020. And they all offer clues about how to respond (or not) in the face of big outages to your institutional services.
Wallace had to postpone the start of its spring semester for two days and extend its registration process when the institution’s network was brought down. According to Facebook posts, the attack brought down the college website, Blackboard, student portals, sundry forms and the phone system. However, the campus emphasized, it found no evidence that data was “stolen or misused.”
When Niagara’s website was damaged by ransomware, it too issued a statement, which noted that “some of its email servers were encrypted by ransomware” and that the school had brought in a “third-party vendor to understand the nature and scope of the...attack and to ensure that the servers become fully operational as soon as possible.” That was the extent of the outreach to the campus.
The criminals that struck Butler County CC demanded the equivalent of $147,000, according to a message put out by the college. The same note told the
The criminals demanded the equivalent of $147,000, according to a message put out by the college. The same note told the campus community that it was working with a “regional cybersecurity
firm” to “identify and contain this new strain of ransomware.”
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