(Cleveland)- Cybercriminals have attacked the White County Schools Computer System, but quick work by the school’s IT Department averted a major issue. Superintendent Dr. Jeff Wilson said the system was attacked by a foreign “ransomware worm”.
The attack was discovered early Monday morning and involved an attempt to infect and take control of several of the system’s mission-critical software programs and individual staff with computers using the Windows operating system.
According to Wilson, the school’s technology staff halted the attacks, shut down the systems, and began the process of determining the extent of the attack.
He said, ” it was evident that they didn’t know what they were looking for because they didn’t go after the financials specifically, they didn’t specifically go after social security numbers or any of that. The good news, there we had no student or staff data that was compromised.”
Wilson stated, “Our technology staff did a great job halting the attack keeping the impact of spreading. We have a strong system firewall and will continue to investigate ways to thwart such attacks, said Wilson. Unfortunately, the bad guys have access to tools that make that job very difficult. We will stay vigilant. ” we normally have what is called a closed system, basically you would just about have to be in our system to break into our system,” but he said they believe that for some reason, possibly to help a student who possibly needed information from home because of an illness, they opened up an outside window to the system and that is where they got in.
Wilson said White County wasn’t the only system to get hit, apparently, a couple of other systems in the state were also attacked.
