SW New Mexico News

From students using the internet to computerized records containing sensitive information to emailing parents and guardians, modern schools and school systems rely heavily on their computers and software being in top shape.

So it will take some more time for two Dona Ana County school systems, Gadsden and Las Cruces, to recover, at least financially, from ransomware attacks that they sustained last year, according to a report from the Las Cruces Sun-News.

Ransomware is destructive computer software, such as viruses. According to Merriam Webster, they “requires the victim to pay a ransom to access encrypted files.” Both school districts — Gadsden in July and Las Cruces in October — were attacked by Ryuk, a known ransomware, the paper said. 

Ransomware is usually introduced by a link in an email that disguises itself as from a legitimate source which is likely known to the recipient. It locks files and typically demands huge sums of money for the computer owner(s) to regain access; it can also delete stored data.

The school district shut down its system as soon as it discovered it had been encrypted by hackers and did not negotiate with or pay anything to them, the Sun-News said. Gadsden did not report any actual demand for ransom from the hackers.

At the end of January, according to the newspaper, Las Cruces administrators updated the school board on its clean-up efforts, which are ongoing; so far, only around 6,000 of the districts 30,000 computers have been scrubbed. The district is in the process of hiring more technicians as well as replacing firewalls and new servers, the school board was told. 

Administrators said that no pay periods were missed, the health records of students were not compromised and its safety systems are fine. However, specialized curricula were, in many cases, lost, and teachers have had to use and even upgrade their personal computers to keep up.

Gadsden reported it has moved its email server to the cloud, its financial system is secure, and it could not provide a timeline for when student computers would be usable, the Sun-News reported.