Daily Mail

School pays £1,500 ransom after falling victim to hack attack

- By Chris Brooke

A SCHOOL is reported to have paid a £1,500 ransom after falling victim to a cyber attack.

Durham Sixth Form Centre was targeted in April last year when a computer virus encrypted college files which contained students’ work.

the identity of the hackers has not been revealed, but it happened around the time of the global WannaCry ransomware attack that hit the NHS, banks and businesses.

that attack – widely believed to have been the work of north Korean hackers – was estimated to have affected more than 200,000 computers in 150 countries.

Phil Butler, a former policeman and cybercrime expert at roxburgh Forensics, told the BBC paying the ransom was ‘madness’. he said: ‘you’re exposing yourself to a whole world of pain, becoming an easy target for future attacks, and not only that you’re encouragin­g the criminalit­y, actually potentiall­y facilitati­ng money laundering.’

Student tommy Davis claimed his grade in his It A-level suffered because his coursework was never recovered. ‘they tried to decrypt it but they were never able to, so basically all the It coursework I left over there to get marked was gone,’ he said.

‘So I didn’t get the marks I’d actually done work for.’ Lewis russ, 19, was about to take his A-levels when the attack happened.

he said: ‘We came back from the easter holidays and the Wifi wasn’t working and they said “you can’t go on the computers they are down at the moment”.

‘rumours started going round to say we’ve been hacked and they’ve taken all of our files, which was quite alarming considerin­g the fact that I took lots of subjects which had literally all my work on the computers.’ his work was recovered and he is now studying at northumbri­a University.

the school confirmed that it made the payment and that it has informed police about the hack, the BBC reported. A spokesman for Durham Police said it would not recommend the payment of a ransom.

the sixth form college, with approximat­ely 1,300 pupils, refused to comment yesterday on the ransom report and the local education authority said such a decision would be a matter for the governors.

Margaret Whellans, Durham County Council’s corporate director for children and young people’s services, said: ‘Durham Sixth Form Centre is a maintained school, managed by a governing body.

‘It is therefore for governors to consider and agree any course of action if such an incident occurs. We would not be involved in that discussion and are therefore unable to comment further.’

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