Cedar Rapids schools pay ransom in hacker attack

The Cedar Rapids school district paid a ransom in hopes of keeping personal data compromised in a hacker attack last month from being released.

“As part of the process to resolve this matter, CRCSD made payment to a third-party entity to ensure critical information that may have been accessed was not released,” Superintendent Noreen Bush wrote Friday in a letter to parents.

We made this decision after consulting closely with cyber security experts and legal counsel and determining it was in the best interest of our school community.

Her letter did not disclose the amount of ransom that was paid, nor provide the name of the group that launched the attack.

Both Cedar Rapids and Linn-Mar school districts experienced disruptions in their computer systems within a month of each other starting in July, shutting down some operations for days as the start of the new academic year approaches Aug. 23.

Bush, in her letter to parents, said that since the cyberattack was uncovered, “we have worked with our internal IT staff and third-party cyber security experts to help resolve this matter and to take steps to ensure something similar does not happen again.”

Schools make “easy targets” for hackers because they often are not prepared enough to keep highly valuable personal data from being compromised, a local security expert said.

Last week, the world's largest networking vendor Cisco discovered that its corporate network was accessed by hackers after an employee's personal Google account was compromised.