14 DAY TRIAL // Representatives of the North East Independent School District, in Texas, USA, have admitted that many of their school campuses have fallen victim to the recent wave of ransomware infections that's been plaguing the US and most parts of the globe.
According to local TV station KENS5, the infections happened all through the last two months and affected two of the school district's departments, and 20 school campuses.
There are no details on what type of ransomware hit these institutions. School officials say that the ransomware infections managed to lock around 2.5 TB of information.
The good news is that the schools were running professional backup software and were able to recover all their files without honoring the ransom demand.
"Our technology department was able to work very quickly and delete all the encrypted files and use backup data to get them going again," a school district spokesperson said.
This was not the case with many previous infections, which affected hospitals, churches, schools, and even courthouses, most of which have significantly more funds than a Texas school, but eventually had to pay ransom demands because they didn't have the practical sense to run 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.