Classes have been canceled in Delano, Minnesota, on Wednesday after the school district said it suffered a “cyber incident.”
Delano Public Schools Superintendent Matt Schoen says they discovered early Tuesday morning that someone gained access to their system, printing out hundreds of pages throughout the district that just said the word “ransom” at the top, with a message that was otherwise encrypted.
Schoen said it’s unclear if it was an attack, but the district network was compromised.
“This is real. We’ve determined that this was not anything that was done internally, a student involved or anything of the sort,” Schoen said.
He says he’s confident the hackers don’t have student’s personal information, adding that no one has sent the district any demands yet.
“We do feel very strongly that we had good systems in place and that’s why we’ve been able to contain this,” Schoen said.
Just last month, a hacker shut down schools in Spring Lake Park for two days. The hacker got into some systems and demanded a ransom. The school district said there was no evidence they accessed any personal information.
WCCO spoke Wednesday with Bryce Austin, a cybersecurity expert with TCE Strategy. Austin says public schools are often low-hanging fruit thanks to outdated technology.
“I think education really is in the crosshairs,” Austin said. “Think of it as a car that was built before there were seat belts. It’s hard to add that to a vehicle safely. It kind of needs to be built with that in mind.”
Austin says the safety feature upgrades are often too expensive for school districts. In Spring Lake, a spokesperson says they are implementing “additional safeguards that go beyond industry standards,” adding there’s no evidence so far that stolen data was misused.
In Delano, Schoen says their system worked as intended to keep the impact of the hack limited.
“When that internet was shut down, they had limited access to potentially just internal servers. Not information that would include student information, staff information or Google account,” he said.
Schoen says authorities, including the FBI, are aware, but it’s unclear who committed the hack or where in the world they’re based.
Delano students are due back in the classroom Thursday, though they’re going old school with the tech, using ethernet cables to access the internet for the time being.
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