Governor John Bel Edwards declared a state of emergency after several school districts were hit with ransomware attacks.  

The attacks keep on coming. The latest victim: Northshore School District.

Visit the NSD website and you’ll be greeted by a warning about a server outage. “This weekend, the District servers were the subject of a significant cyber attack,” it states. Phone and voicemail access has been impacted, as well as point of sale systems,and ParentVUE/StudentVUE  (which allow for access to grades, assignments, and communication with teachers).

If there’s a silver lining, it’s that the District has yet to see any evidence that student, family, or staff data has been compromised. That’s a welcome bit of comfort given the long and difficult recovery process ahead.

The Northshore School District’s 33 schools serve the area around Bothell, about 20 minutes northeast of Seattle. Over 23,000 students are enrolled there and the District employs 2,100 people.

No ransom demands have been made by the attacker(s) yet, but there’s little doubt that their motivation is financial. A quick look at the NSD annual report makes it clear enough why it would have been targeted.

2017-2018 expenditures totaled more than $270 million. Like most school districts around the country, NSD also has a significant number of big-budget projects on the go right now: building repairs, equipment upgrades, improvements to athletic facilities.

​Let us email you our white-paper on “PREDICT AND PREVENT AN ATTACK BEFORE IT HAPPENS”