Thousands of School Websites Go Offline Due to Ransomware Attack on Finalsite

[Terrell Byrd <terrell.byrd () riskbasedsecurity com>]

https://www.securityweek.com/thousands-school-websites-go-offline-due-ransomware-attack-finalsite

Thousands of school websites around the world went offline this week as a
result of a ransomware attack on Finalsite, a US-based company that
provides digital marketing and communications solutions to schools.

On its website, Finalsite claims that 8,000 schools across 110 countries
use its services, and it launches 300 new websites every year.

Finalsite informed customers on its status page on January 4 that it had
been investigating an outage, and on January 6 it revealed that the
incident was caused by ransomware hitting “certain systems” in its
environment.

The ransomware attack appears to have caused the thousands of school
websites hosted by Finalsite to go offline. By January 6, the company had
started restoring affected sites, but noted that some may still experience
performance and other issues.

“We have full access to our files and data. The forensic investigation is
ongoing and at this time, we have no evidence that our data or client data
has been taken. If we determine otherwise through the course of the
investigation, we’ll act swiftly to notify you and will take all
appropriate actions,” the company said.

SecurityWeek has checked the websites of major ransomware groups, but none
of them appears to have taken credit for this attack until now.

It’s not uncommon for cybercriminals to target schools with ransomware. One
year ago, the FBI and CISA issued a warning following a significant
increase in ransomware attacks on K-12 schools.

The agencies at the time advised educational institutions to take steps to
secure their systems. However, there’s not much a school can do if they
fully rely on a third-party service provider and that provider has its
systems compromised, such as in the case of the Finalsite incident.

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