As Budgets Tighten, Colleges Still Vulnerable to Ransomware

Colleges and universities around the country are proving to be easy prey to hackers with ransom demands. In Massachusetts, Cape Cod Community College was defrauded of $800,000 last year, while Colorado’s Regis University paid an undisclosed amount to regain access to their files after a ransomware attack—and still did not get access back.

Ransomware is a type of malicious software that, once it infects a computer system, allows attackers to lock out victims until they pay a ransom to regain access. With budgets getting tighter for public and private colleges in the wake of the coronavirus, funding IT security could slip through the cracks.

In many ways, a college is an ideal target for hackers. Even a small one has hundreds of people connecting to its network, and many campuses have old machines with out-of-date software used by students and the public. It only takes one person clicking on the wrong email to compromise the entire system. Colleges are “a prime environment for these attacks,” Jared Phipps, a cybersecurity expert, told Inside Higher Ed.

When a college’s IT system gets compromised, the ransom amount can vary considerably. When the admissions-tracking system at Grinnell, Oberlin, and Hamilton Colleges (which they share) was hacked, aspiring freshmen were offered the chance to see their files for around $4,000, which was later discounted to $60.

In contrast, when for-profit Monroe College was the victim of a ransomware attack, hackers demanded $2 million. Crowder College in Missouri saw a similarly high price tag of $1.6 million to regain control of its system. The University of Calgary and Carleton University in Canada and Los Angeles Valley College paid ransomware demands that cost the schools up to $35,000, according to the cybersecurity company Acronis.

iT managers for any government function - state agencies, schools, county governments, etc., should be held financially liable and perhaps criminally negligent for not taking proper precautions with citizen owned data.

Who runs a huge data operation not thinking about buying and implementing basic computer virus and malware defenses to prevent these huge ransomware bribes and payoffs?

So typical. Government workers don’t give a damn about the citizens they presumably work for.
And none of them ever get fired or punished.

First the data isn’t citizen owned, it belongs to government

Second Politicians are not even held to this standard, or any government coffee drinker for that matter.

Third These malware attacks that target government and enterprise systems are NOT the same crap that grandma loaded on her peecee by clicking on something. It is an entire different ballgame. These Ukraine/Russian/Eastern Europe hackers are really good, they spend years figuring out a particular target and once they understand their systems they launch an attack. Usually through someone who not knowingly lets them in.

I’m out of the loop.on the latest technology, but, I remember a time when we did backups on our systems, and IT guys backed up the network.

The idea was that everything could be restored from.backup tapes and files if needed.

Do things work differently today? Is it a mot more complicated than simply restoring the backed up data to the system?

Nice try.
The data IS owned by the citizens. Do you know that we supposedly have a government of the people, and all powers, and assets, belong to the people?

Next, there are defensive software products that can beat the threats you so admire. These government people are too apathetic or cheap to employ the.

I think you are a government worker.

Reliable backups are the first line of defense. When was the last time you backed up your computer? Cloned your boot drive?

From 10/23/2017, bleeping computer...

With the release of Windows 10 Fall Creators Update last week (bear in mind the 2017 date), the "Controlled Folder Access" that Microsoft touted in June is now live for millions of users. As the name hints, the Controlled Folder Access feature allows users to control who can access certain folders. The feature works on a "block everything by default" philosophy, which means that on a theoretical level, it would be able to prevent ransomware when it tries to access and encrypt files stored in those folders. The benefits of using Controlled Folder Access for your home and work computers are tangible for anyone that's fearful of losing crucial files to a ransomware infection. Full article here.

No, it is not owned by us, do I have the right to walk on to any army base or into any room or department in any federal building or would I get carried off the property with a summons for trespassing?

No software is fool proof, software is only good for what is known, the unknown is the problem.

So you are telling me that you want some IT Guy or “network administrator” who makes a big giant salary of 71K a year with a federal pension that isn’t going to be worth 12 cents in a decade anyways be personally responsible for data systems that are 3 decades old, software that was purchased by whomever had the best political connections and some screw ball “translation/transaction” servers running Windows that makes these old antique main frames communicate on the internet running cisco routers that were obsolete a decade or so ago. So when one of these ransome wares get in, you want the government to go in, find that guy, seize his Subaru, take his apartment, his box of cornflakes, his stack of porno mags and frog march him out of whatever shiatstain government building he works in and throw him in a cage for the rest of his pathetic loser government employee life because Nancy Pelosi wouldn’t approve an appropriate budget to run these government systems properly because her husband’s company wouldn’t get the contract, never mind the fact that he has zero experience in any of this.

I say, go fuck yourself.

Have a nice day.

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