FinalSite, a leading school website services provider was hit with a ransomware attack which disrupted access to thousands of school’s websites worldwide.
FinalSite is a software as a service (SaaS) provider that provides website design, hosting, and content management solutions for K-12 school districts and universities. They claim to offer solutions for over 8,000 schools and universities across 115 different countries.
The school districts that hosted their websites with FinalSite found errors and performance issues on Tuesday. FinalSite at that time said that they were experiencing error across various services, affecting mostly their Composer content management system.
This impact may include, but is not limited to, Groups Manager, Constituent Manager, Login, Forms Manager (old), Registration Manager, Directory Elements, Athletics Manager, Calendar Manager etc.
After three days of disruption, FinalSite confirmed that the outages were caused by a ransomware attack on their network.
FinalSite apologized in a status update and stated that while they have made progress overnight to get all websites up and running, full restoration has taken longer than anticipated.
As soon as their team identified the presence of ransomware on certain systems in their environment, they took immediately measures to secure the systems and to contain the activity. They launched an investigation into the event with the assistance of third-party forensic specialists, and began proactively taking certain systems offline.
Morgan Delack, the Director of Communications for FinalSite, said that they proactively shut down their IT systems to prevent the spread of the attack, which led to approximately 5,000 school websites going offline.
He confirmed that the malware did not shut down the systems but they proactively did so upon learning of what happened in order to protect and secure the data.
Delack did not share the name of the ransomware operation due to ongoing investigations.
Image Credits : Facts Management
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