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On Long Island, acting Manhasset Schools Superintendent Gaurav Passi issued an alert to the community that said that the district was notified that some files stolen from school servers had been posted online.
“We were notified that yesterday, the criminals posted certain files to the dark web that they stole from our servers,” he advised.
“We are currently reviewing these files, and we will provide direct notification, in accordance with applicable laws, to any individual whose personal information was potentially acquired by these criminals.”
Anyone directly impacted by the reported leak is to be directly notified by the district as the investigation into the breach continues, though the system is now reportedly safe.
“Due to security updates completed by our network engineers and IT staff that included network segmentation, we were able to restore our computer systems from backups,” Passi wrote. “As such, the district did not make any ransom payment to the criminals.”
Passi confirmed the breach during a Board of Education meeting earlier this month, stating that the district took the network offline on Tuesday, Sept. 14 for what was initially called “a service disruption.”
“Our district was the victim of a criminal enterprise, and we understand how upsetting this is for our community,” he stated. "Unfortunately, ransomware attacks have been on the rise.
“We are one of the latest victims in this growing trend which has targeted other school districts, hospitals, and municipalities across the country,” he continued. "The district takes data security very seriously, and we are implementing several additional measures to enhance our security in an effort to prevent an incident like this from reoccurring in the future.”
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