Hackers Make $2,900 From South Carolina School District
Dorchester School District Two, of South Carolina, was hit with ransomware over the summer. The attack was found when the district discovered over half of its data was inaccessible. After further investigation, they found 25 servers riddled with an undisclosed ransomware variant. The school district was unable to decrypt the data themselves. Therefore, they chose to pay the hacker’s ransom demand of $2,900. As of today, the school district has successfully decrypted the data on 24 of the 25 infected servers with the decryption key. Unfortunately the remaining server has to be manually restored by entering the data from paper files.
PC Matic does not recommend paying the hackers for the decryption key. Not only is there no guarantee the hackers will provide a decryption key, but there is also a risk of the decryption key provided not restoring any or all of the data. Paying the hackers also reinforces the criminal behavior.
Other Ransomware Attacks
To see a full list of ransomware attacks that have taken place, you can click here. We have also created a ransomware map, see below, of the ransomware attacks that have taken place in the U.S. this year.
