Privacy News L.A. College pays $28G Ransom

[Ink]

A Los Angeles college paid a $28,000 ransom fee after a cyberattack

The Valley Star, the Los Angeles Valley College school newspaper, reported Friday that hackers locked students and staff out of files, emails and messaging systems and threatened to delete everything if the ransom wasn’t paid within a week.

"You have 7 days to send us the BitCoin after 7 days we will remove your private keys and it’s impossible to recover your files"​

The school eventually paid the fee in bitcoins after it determined that was the cheaper alternative than to remove the hackers’ ransomware virus.

The paper reported the school used a so-called cyber-insurance policy to pay the fee.

 

[SHvFl]

Eventually big organization like this will learn one way or the other.

 

[Svoll]

Quite disappointing news. Its no wonder more and more ransomware are appearing, it has become quite common seeing how Schools, businesses, etc are paying these ransomwares. I understand that it might be under insurance, but in the end We all pay for it.

 

[Solarquest]

Quite disappointing news. Its no wonder more and more ransomware are appearing, it has become quite common seeing how Schools, businesses, etc are paying these ransomwares. I understand that it might be under insurance, but in the end We all pay for it.

+1!
The question is also, why did they get Infected?
Did they take all reasonable precautions or were they "lazy/cheap" with security?

 

[Paul123]

The problem is this just encourages more and more ransomware. I guess on the good side it will get them to look at security and regular backups, though I should imagine a college with many students, its difficult to prevent malware. I wonder how many companies pay up but dont admit it.

 

[jamescv7]

Terrible move, yes some ransomware are built within strong mechanism to take longer time to create decryptor alone, however to avoid the incident then a backup plan should be enforced.

A typical I.T expert or enthusiasm should carefully engage clear path conclusion.

 

[Vipersd]

Happy clicker or qwerty/123456 password is responsible. Even the best protection is useless if you don't use your brain.