The Yorktown and Croton-Harmon school districts in Westchester County recently had their computer systems hacked by a cyber security attack coming from someone seekiing to get a payment to remove the ransomware that froze both systems.
The Yorktown schools were forced to temporarily shifted from a hybrid learning model to all-remote lessons after its district shared news of a cyberattack on Oct. 12.
The ransomware attack encrypted data on the Yorktown Central School District’s networks, forcing officials to restore servers from backups and go room-to-room to reimage devices, Superintendent Ron Hattar said in an email to parents Thursday viewed by WSJ Pro Cybersecurity. The superintendent’s office didn’t respond to requests for comment.
Two Westchester school districts were targeted by a cyber security attack on school-based desktops and laptops that kept students learning at home.
The Croton-Harmon school district also faced a similar attached this month. In a message to parents and students, Croton-Harmon Superintendent Deborah O’Connell said the incident was a ransomware attack. This kind of data breach keeps an organization from accessing its data in order to solicit a ransom to get the data back.
O’Connell explained that the district “never considered” paying the ransome, “as [we] were able to restore our systems from previous data backups,” O’Connell said.
Yorktown Superintendent Ron Hattar did not specify the kind of cyber attack his district faced in communications to the community, but said the district’s response was difficult. “The impact of this attack on our systems is requiring an extraordinary amount of time to restore servers and devices,” Hattar said in a Wednesday email. Yorktown also did not pay the ransom requested.
Both superintendents told their communities there was no evidence that any personal data was compromised. Only laptops and computer workstations were affected, not Chromebooks and iPads.
Ransomware attacks are an increasingly common kind of cybersecurity breach facing school districts. “Unfortunately, education is a ripe target for this kind of thing,” said Brian Howard, communications director for Southern Westchester BOCES. “It requires constant vigilance.”
