Schools get serious about a different kind of bully: Cybercriminals
The first inkling of cyber trouble for the Judson Independent School District came around 1:30 a.m. on July 17, 2021.
By 3:30 a.m., a district employee lost all contact with the servers. By the time he got to the school at 4:30 a.m., a ransom note had appeared on all the computer screens. The employee called the police and the FBI.
The Texas district – with more than 24,000 students and more than 4,500 employees – had been the victim of a ransomware attack targeting its data and network systems. Ultimately, the district paid a $547,000 ransom and embarked on a recovery process that took more than a year to complete, according to Lacey Gosch, the district’s assistant superintendent of technology, who recently testified before the U.S. House Oversight Committee.
“The mentality that any organization is too small or insignificant to be affected by a cybersecurity breach is living under a false sense of security,” she wrote in a along with her in-person testimony. “The
