Cyber Crime

The Los Angeles Unified School District hit by a ransomware attack

One of the US largest School districts, the Los Angeles Unified School District, suffered a ransomware attack during the weekend.

The Los Angeles Unified School District is one of the largest school distinct in the US, it was hit by a ransomware attack during the Labor Day weekend.

The security breach took place a few days ahead of the scheduled opening that was planned for Tuesday morning which will happen regularly.

“Los Angeles Unified detected unusual activity in its Information Technology systems over the weekend, which after initial review, can be confirmed as an external cyber attack on our Information Technology assets. Since the identification of the incident, which is likely criminal in nature, we continue to assess the situation with law enforcement agencies.” reads a statement Los Angeles Unified School District. “Despite this significant disruption to our system’s infrastructure, schools will open on Tuesday, September 6 as scheduled.”

The LA Unified School District is investigating the incident and announced to have implemented the incident response procedure. The investigation involved the the U.S. Department of Education, the FBI and the Department of Homeland Security’s Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency.

The district is working with its partners to restore the impacted services, it also added that critical business systems, employee healthcare and payroll are not impacted. The cyberattack has not impacted safety and emergency mechanisms in place at schools.

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Pierluigi Paganini

(SecurityAffairs – hacking, ransomware)

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Pierluigi Paganini

Pierluigi Paganini is member of the ENISA (European Union Agency for Network and Information Security) Threat Landscape Stakeholder Group and Cyber G7 Group, he is also a Security Evangelist, Security Analyst and Freelance Writer. Editor-in-Chief at "Cyber Defense Magazine", Pierluigi is a cyber security expert with over 20 years experience in the field, he is Certified Ethical Hacker at EC Council in London. The passion for writing and a strong belief that security is founded on sharing and awareness led Pierluigi to find the security blog "Security Affairs" recently named a Top National Security Resource for US. Pierluigi is a member of the "The Hacker News" team and he is a writer for some major publications in the field such as Cyber War Zone, ICTTF, Infosec Island, Infosec Institute, The Hacker News Magazine and for many other Security magazines. Author of the Books "The Deep Dark Web" and “Digital Virtual Currency and Bitcoin”.

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