Ransomware Attacks Against Higher Ed Increase
Susan D’Agostino
July 22, 2022
Colleges and universities experienced a surge in ransomware attacks in 2021, and those attacks had significant operational and financial costs, according to a new report.
“You can collect that money in a couple of hours,” a ransomware hacker’s representative wrote in a secure June 2020 chat with a University of California, San Francisco, negotiator about the $3 million ransom demanded. “You need to take us seriously. If we’ll release on our blog student records/data, I’m 100% sure you will lose more than our price what we ask.”
The university later paid $1.14 million to gain access to the decryption key.
Colleges and universities worldwide experienced a surge in ransomware attacks in 2021, and those attacks had significant operational and financial costs, according to a new report from Sophos, a global cybersecurity leader. The survey included 5,600 IT professionals, including 410 from higher education, across 31 countries. Though most of the education victims succeeded in retrieving some of their data, few retrieved all of it, even after paying the ransom.
