Ransomware cripples 8000 school websites

More than 8,000 institutions in more than 110 countries have been affected by a ransomware attack on FinalSite, a cloud-based web hosting provider specializing in school and educational websites.

FinalSite claimed in a status update last night that “on Tuesday, January 4th, our team identified the existence of ransomware on specific systems in our environment.”

Despite the lengthy outage, which has impacted thousands of schools, the business said it couldn’t reveal the event until yesterday because of an ongoing investigation.

FinalSite stated that it has shut down the compromised systems and has recovered and restored most of the affected websites.

“Many communities are reporting that they are just unable to use their emergency alert system to advise their people of shutdown due to weather or COVID-19 protocol,” one of FinalSite’s clients claimed in a Reddit thread late yesterday night after the firm revealed the hack.

In spite of this, FinalSite reported that they are successfully restoring from backups despite the attack that encrypted some of their servers.