Representatives from the North East Independent School District, in Texas, USA, have admitted that many of their campuses have fallen victim to a recent wave of ransomware infections that is already plaguing the US and most parts of the world.
According to local television station KENS5, the infections occurred over the past two months and affected two of the school district's departments, as well as 20 campuses.
There are no details on the type of ransomware that hit these institutions. School officials say the ransomware infections managed to lock up approximately 2.5TB of information.
The good news is that the schools were running professional backup software and were able to recover all of their files without paying the ransom.
"Our technology department was able to work very quickly and delete all encrypted files and use the backup data to make it usable again," a school district spokesperson said.
This was not the same case as many previous infections, which affected hospitals, churches, schools, and even courthouses, most of which have significantly more funds than a Texas school, but were ultimately forced to pay the ransom demandsbecause they had not thought about the most basic thing: running daily or weekly software backup programs.
Last week, based on the high numbers of ransomware infections, US and Canadian authorities issued an official cyber-alert regarding this growing threat.
