The Bartow County School System experienced a network outage this week that took down its websites, online access and email.
As of Thursday, the school system of about 14,000 students still lacked access, and the district website remains down.
“The issue is ongoing, but our dedicated technical experts are working tirelessly to restore internet connectivity,” said Bartow communications coordinator Alisha Evans. “While email services are limited, phones are operational and all classes, lunch periods, dismissals, bus services and after-school activities are continuing as usual.”
Bartow doesn’t have an estimated time for when full functionality will be restored, Evans said. She said the district was in the process of figuring out what happened and she did not want to speculate whether the district was the victim of a ransomware attack.
In such attacks, malicious software infiltrates the system, encrypts an organization’s or company’s data and demands a ransom payment to restore it. Schools and government agencies have become targets because their data often includes sensitive information about students and citizens, which increases the pressure to pay the ransom.
Earlier this year, a cybercrime gang struck Fulton County government servers, taking down hundreds of phone lines and forcing county offices to devise offline workarounds. The county did not pay the ransom. In November, Henry County Schools restricted internet access because of “suspicious activity” on its internal network, later confirmed to be a ransomware attack from a criminal operation operating outside the United States.
Comparitech, a cybersecurity company, documented 491 ransomware attacks on K-12 schools and colleges since 2018, including 121 last year. The company said more than 6.7 million individual records were accessed in these attacks.
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