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Louisiana’s Cybersecurity Commission activates its emergency powers in response.
Jim Salter
– Jul 26, 2019 5: 55 pm UTC
Enlarge / To the credit of the three school districts affected, at least nobody’s trying to pay the Danegeld.
This Wednesday, Louisiana Governor John Bel Edwards declared a State of Emergency in response to ransomware attacks on three public school districts.
There’s no word so far on which ransomware variant has hit the school districts or what the exact extent of damages is. Eddie Jones, principal of Florien High School (a school in one of the three affected districts), told KSLA News that his technology supervisor received an alert on his phone at 4am Sunday about unusually high bandwidth usage. Shortly afterward, investigators discovered ransomware on the school servers. Jones says “anything and everything housed solely on the School District’s servers” was lost, including 17 years of his own personal documents.
The Sabine and Morehouse district ransomware attacks this week follow an attack on the Monroe City school district last week. Morehouse parish claims not to have been affected to the extent of the other two parishes, and it states that “all major systems, including payroll, are operational.”
The three school districts have all made statements to the effect that they do not believe sensitive or private information was compromised, or that any “unauthorized access” occurred. This seems to be an overly confident statement, given Jones’ statement that his district’s first awareness of the problem stemmed from unusually high bandwidth usage. Still, there’s no way to know for certain until the statewide effort to address the attacks and look for traces of their authors concludes and more concrete information is disseminated.
Louisiana’s declaration of a state emergency follows a model established by Colorado in the wake of a ransomware attack there in March 2018. In Colorado, the declaration of emergency only came after a week the Colorado Office of Information Technology’s overwhelmed and short-staffed IT department spent trying to disinfect more than 2,000 infected machines. Declaring a state of emergency allows the National Guard’s resources and personnel to be brought in.
Edwards’ emergency declaration also freezes the prices of services and goods in the designated emergency area to those “ordinarily charged… in the same market area at or immediately before the state of emergency.” This is likely a pre-emptive measure to prevent local IT consulting services the schools may contract from hiking their rates while the schools are desperate.
This declaration is the first activation of the emergency support functions of Louisiana’s Cybersecurity Commission, which was first established by Governor Edwards in 2017. Edwards declared then that Louisiana is “an international leader in regards to cybersecurity capabilities.” How well the state responds to these attacks—including discovering the actors behind them, and establishing and truthfully disclosing the actual nature and extent of data both lost and exfiltrated during them—will do much toward outlining the veracity of that statement.