The Next Victim of a Cybersecurity Attack

Legal Brief

You are sitting at your office desk on a Monday morning ready to catch up on e-mails from the weekend, but your computer is frozen. Your district’s director of technology calls to inform you that your network is down and all backups have been held hostage. No one in the district can send or receive e-mails and teachers cannot provide remote instruction.

Your school district has become the latest victim of a cyberattack, and the attackers are requesting $1 million in ransom to restore access. What do you do?

This scenario is happening in school districts of all sizes. At least 44 ransomware attacks occurred against public school districts during the first four months of 2021, according to cybersecurity company Recorded Future. In one recent ransomware attack, a county school district had to stop online classes for 110,000 students for two days with the recovery costing nearly $8 million.