In November, 2016, a professor at California nursing school, Gurnick\u00a0Acadamy,\u00a0was attempting to access his lectures.\u00a0The lectures were saved on an external storage device, which he plugged into his work PC.\u00a0 It was then, he realized his lectures were gone.\u00a0 Completely encrypted.\u00a0 He contacted the school’s IT department for assistance.\u00a0 Luckily, the IT department worked not only quickly, but precisely, to ensure the infection did not spread throughout the college.<\/p>\n
The professor had the option to pay one bitcoin, or $740 USD for his files to be restored.\u00a0 He decided to forego the payment and create his lectures from scratch.<\/p>\n
Val Paschenko, IT department manager at the school, made the following statement to CSO Online<\/a>,<\/p>\n \u201cFor the malware, we believe that it originated on the instructor’s personal computer or elsewhere. Before this incident [the instructor] mentioned that he had experience with some virus issues on his personal computer. We think that he wasn’t able to open some files while working on his home PC and decided to give it a shot on an office PC but can\u2019t be certain.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n To see a full list of ransomware attacks that took place 2016, you can click here<\/a>.\u00a0 We have also created a ransomware map, see below, of the ransomware attacks that have taken place in the U.S.Ransomware Attacks<\/h4>\n
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