Florida School District hit with Ransomware
Fort Lauderdale, Fla. school district was hit with a ransomware attack. Hackers stole personal information from students and teachers, disrupted the district's networks, and caused services to be unavailable. The Conti Gang is demanding $40 million. The attack was discovered on March 7 at Broward County Public Schools. Details have emerged on DataBreaches.net, which recently posted a screenshot of a chat between hackers and a school district official about the ransom demanded. That has shed new light on the incident, given the exorbitant nature of the ransom demands.
During the conversation, hackers claiming to be from the ContiLocker Team, informed the official that they had encrypted files and downloaded more than 1 terabyte of personal data, including financial, contracts, database and other documents. The data contains Social Security numbers and other personal information about teachers and students. To decrypt the files and prevent the hackers from publishing the info online, they demanded a ransom of $40 million. They told the official that their research revealed that the school district had revenues of $4 billion to justify their demand.
The Broward County Public School District released a statement that they are working with cybersecurity experts to investigate the incident and remediate the affected systems. Broward County Public Schools, with 271,000 students, is the nation's sixth-largest school district and has an annual budget of about $4 billion. The ransom demand shows that this particular hacking group has done it's research when targeting it's victims. But even with that kind of revenue, a public school district still would not have the kind of capital on hand to pay so much money to hackers. U.S. school districts may appear to some have large budgets, but almost all of those budgets are committed to ongoing expenses that contractually committed, there's little to no discretionary budget, and even core resources are underfunded.
Educational institutions have fallen victim to an explosion of attacks by ransomware gangs in the last year. Last September, a ransomware attack on California's Newhall School District in Valencia affected all distance learning across 10 different grade schools. That same month, the Clark County School District, which includes Las Vegas, was crippled by a ransomware attack by the Maze gang where data stolen from that attack turned up on an underground forum later that month. Last summer alone, four different universities became victim to the NetWalker ransomware gang, according to tallies from Avira. The University of Utah paid almost half a million dollars). The University of California San Francisco paid $1.14 million.
Ransomware groups are continuing to steal data in addition to encryption. Ransomware gangs understand that they can gain an edge in ransom payments by threatening not only to lock corporate data, but to leak it as well. Virtually all big ransomware groups have started leak sites where stolen data is published. This is just another case demonstrating the major problem of Ransomware attacks that are increasing more and more. It doesn't matter if it is a public school, a contractor dealing with sensitive military data, or a small business with personal client data, they are all targets for these kind s of attacks.