From The State
Midlands school officials were told to pay foreign hackers a ransom after a cyberattack knocked out their computer systems and compromised some students’ data.
Lexington-Richland 5 declined to pay, Superintendent Akil Ross told a virtual town hall for district parents on Tuesday. A former FBI agent and cybersecurity expert who took part in the town hall said that was the right call.
“I tell my clients not to pay,” Jack Jupin told listeners. “Because if you pay, it just perpetuates the problem. Now they wait six months and do it again, because maybe you’ll pay the second time.”
A district-wide data breach in June caused the district to delay the start of high school summer classes in Chapin and Irmo area schools, and shut down internet access in district facilities for days. It even caused the payout of a year-end bonus expected by teachers and staff to be delayed.
“We knew at 6:30 a.m. that morning that we had lost access,” Ross said. “We have a cybersecurity protocol just as in the case of someone breaking into one of our buildings. We called law enforcement, we called SLED, and they started an investigation at that point.”