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posted by janrinok on Friday September 06 2019, @09:36AM   Printer-friendly
from the even-better-than-snow-days dept.

Submitted via IRC for AzumaHazuki

Back to school: With latest attack, ransomware cancels classes in Flagstaff

As students returned to school across the country over the past two weeks, school districts are facing an unprecedented wave of ransomware attacks. In the past month, dozens of districts nationwide have been affected by ransomware attacks, in some cases taking entire school systems' networks down in the process.

All classes were cancelled September 5 at Flagstaff Unified School District schools in Arizona after the discovery of a ransomware attack against the district's servers on Wednesday, September 4. All Internet services were taken down by the school district's information technology team at about 3pm local time on Wednesday, when the ransomware was discovered during what district officials said was routine maintenance.

"We have had to break the connection from the Internet to our school sites while we work with Internet security experts to contain and mitigate the issue," FUSD spokesman Zachery Fountain said in a statement to press. No further details on the ransomware were released, and district officials are not sure whether any personal identifying information has been exposed.

More than 70 state and local government agencies have been hit with ransomware so far this year. This steady drumbeat of ransomware attacks against state and local government agencies, including school districts, has not gone unnoticed by citizens. People are increasingly concerned about the damage being done by ransomware. In a recent survey of 2,200 citizens conducted by Morning Consult on behalf of IBM Security, 75% of those surveyed across the United States acknowledged that they are worried about ransomware attacks on cities. And 60% said that cities should not pay the ransom for attacks when they fall victim; instead, they'd prefer focusing such spending on recovery costs.


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  • (Score: 3, Insightful) by gozar on Friday September 06 2019, @02:00PM

    by gozar (5426) on Friday September 06 2019, @02:00PM (#890511)

    There is no way that non-working water or sewers would have stopped my school from holding classes. Air conditioning - kidding aren't you? Not only did our school not have it, but our maths teacher, an ex-army major, ordered all windows to be opened wide even when there was snow outside; he boasted it was why he had never had a cold in his life.

    No water means no one can drink all day and no toilet services. The problem with no air conditioning is not that the students can't handle life without air conditioning, it's because the new climate controlled buildings can't cool down without air conditioning. In the 70s and 80s you can open the windows. The new buildings have smaller windows, and are designed only for emergency egress, not to open to cool.

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