The University of Illinois Chicago said it recently discovered a ransomware attack that limited access to some systems at its College of Medicine and resulted in the theft of data stored on the college’s servers.
UIC said its IT staff, along with College of Medicine IT staff, identified unauthorized activity within portions of the College of Medicine network and immediately activated incident response protocols and brought in cybersecurity experts to investigate, contain the issue and determine what information may have been compromised. A university spokesperson said some College of Medicine systems were temporarily unavailable as a result but have since been restored, and that the university’s main network was not affected and there was no impact on patient care delivery at UI Health.
The university said its forensic investigation is ongoing and that unauthorized actors obtained some data located on College of Medicine servers; cybersecurity experts are reviewing the data to determine whether any personal, research or academic information was compromised. UIC said it will notify affected individuals once that review is complete and has implemented additional security controls to reduce future risk. The incident was reported to law enforcement, and the university has coordinated with agencies throughout the restoration process.
UIC is the largest university in Chicago, serving more than 35,000 students across 16 colleges; its College of Medicine has about 1,300 students.
The attack was claimed last week by a ransomware gang known as Booba, which said it had stolen 344 gigabytes of data. The group emerged at the end of July and has already claimed 49 attacks. Brett Williams of the cybersecurity firm SentinelOne said the group appears to be a rebrand of the Frag ransomware operation, based on the style of its leak site and its negotiation process. Booba renames encrypted files with a “.booba” extension and has variants for both Windows and Linux systems.
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