Thousands of US School Websites Affected By Cyberattack

It’s bold of a hacker or group to choose schools as their target, and not common, as ransomware attacks are looking for one thing; money. However, it’s a shame when schools are affected by cyberattacks, as was the case this week.

Software provider Finalsite suffered a ransomware attack this week, as did 5,000 of the schools that rely on their services to run their websites. Around 8,000 public and private schools and colleges use Finalsite, meaning more than half of schools were affected.

Luckily, a majority of those schools were back online as of the morning of Jan. 7, according to Morgan Delack, Finalsite spokesperson. The company says they found the ransomware Tuesday, Jan. 4, and promptly shut down the network to protect client data.

While schools are much less common targets of cyberattacks, they are affected; ransomware attacks have affected over 1,000 K-12 schools in each of the last three years. We hope steps will be taken to strengthen cybersecurity in general, to protect schools from future attacks.