Big data trove dumped after LA Unified School District says no to ransomware crooks [Ars Technica]

Confidential incident reports, personnel records, and more are leaked online.

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A ransomware outfit calling itself Vice Society has dumped nearly 300,000 files belonging to the Los Angeles Unified School District as punishment for rebuffing demands it pay the group a hefty fee to recover data stolen during a recent cyber intrusion.

Ransomware operators breach targets’ networks, encrypt all their data, and then charge victims a ransom for the decryption key. More recently, the groups have moved to a double extortion model, in which they also publish the data on the dark web unless victims pay a ransom to keep it private. Already this year, 27 school districts with 1,735 schools among them have been hacked in ransomware incidents, Brett Callow, a threat analyst with security firm Emsisoft, said.

The Los Angeles Unified School District is the second biggest school district in the US, behind the New York City Department of Education, making it a trophy of sorts for ransomware groups that prey on these organizations.

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