Glenwood schools recover from cyber-attack for new school year

Report links vast online disinformation campaign to Iran/ Source: MGN
Report links vast online disinformation campaign to Iran/ Source: MGN(WVLT)
Published: Aug. 21, 2019 at 11:26 AM CDT
Email This Link
Share on Pinterest
Share on LinkedIn

The school year for the Glenwood District is off to a challenging start as schools recover from a cyber-attack back in July.

The district’s superintendent Devon Embray, explains that while several servers were hit, the attack will not impact the students.

According to school officials, the attack seemed to encrypt their servers, denying access to any of them. Upon further investigation, it was determined that the system was hit with ransomware and the information was being held, hostage.

Administrators say that no sensitive or confidential information was compromised, but the attack was a costly inconvenience.

“We were kind of dead in the water, we had nowhere of going until we had that information up and running. That server controlled all of our student’s information, schedules, everything we were needing to start the year. For about a week and a half we were shut down and unable to move,” said Embray.

It was just two years ago the district decided to purchase insurance to guard against cyber-attacks. The insurance company was able to negotiate the ransom from $15,000 to $10,000.

Investigators believe the attack was foreign and not domestic.