A cyber attack against education software provider Finalsite affected over 3,000 schools in the U.S. The attack knocked out websites and email at a time when schools systems are more dependent on technology than ever to keep employees, parents, and students aware of weather delays and closing as well as ever-changing COVID-19 policies.
While the ransomware attack put websites and alert notification systems out of commission, Finalsite says that no personal information belonging to customers or users was compromised.
The company apologized to users and also requested that schools avoid using their website service while the company worked to get everything back online. “We are incredibly sorry for this prolonged outage and fully realize the stress it is causing your organizations. While we have made progress overnight to get all websites up and running, full restoration has taken us longer than anticipated.”
The company said the following services are still having issues:
While our team works to restore all remaining File Manager, Media Manager, and Integrations; we wanted to provide more details surrounding how these ongoing efforts may be exhibited on your website.
– Directory/Constituent images may not load correctly
– Slideshows relying on Media Manager may not display correctly
– Virtual tour/Campus tour files may not load
– Online Shop that stores images in File Manager may not display correctly
– Broken image icons in place of File Manager images, PDFs
– Files and folders physically missing from File Manager
– Some data integrations won’t run properly
The company has hired cyber forensic investigators to help recover data lost in the attack. They have not yet revealed how the attack happened.