Dorchester School District Two, of South Carolina, was hit with ransomware over the summer. \u00a0The attack was found when the district discovered over half of its data was inaccessible. \u00a0After further investigation, they found 25 servers riddled with an undisclosed ransomware variant. \u00a0The school district was unable to decrypt the data themselves. \u00a0Therefore, they chose to pay the hacker’s ransom demand of $2,900. \u00a0As of today, the school district has successfully decrypted the data on 24 of the 25 infected servers with the decryption key. \u00a0Unfortunately the remaining server has to be manually restored by entering the data from paper files.<\/p>\n
PC Matic does not recommend paying the hackers for the decryption key. \u00a0Not only is there no guarantee the hackers will provide a decryption key, but there is also a risk of the decryption key provided not restoring any or all of the data. \u00a0Paying the hackers also reinforces the criminal behavior.<\/p>\n
To see a full list of ransomware attacks that have taken place, you can click here<\/a>. We have also created a ransomware map, see below, of the ransomware attacks that have taken place in the U.S. this year.
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