Finalsite, one of the largest school website developers, has been breached by a ransomware attack. Because of this, many school web pages are currently down.
This is currently a major issue, especially since students need updates from their educational institutions to have the latest updates for their classes.
Right now, some public schools have already canceled their classes because of Omicron, one of the latest variants of COVID-19.
Reuters recently reported that the third-largest education district in the U.S., Chicago Public Schools, decided to postpone classes after teachers walked out, demanding stricter safety measures.
Finalsite Ransomware Attack
According to TechCrunch's latest report, Finalsite's security team confirmed that a ransomware attack was able to breach their system on Tuesday, Jan. 4.
A girl wears a face mask as students sit in a classroom of the Petri primary school in Dortmund, western Germany, on June 15, 2020 amid the novel coronavirus COVID-19 pandemic. - From June 15, 2020, all children of primary school age in the western federal state of North Rhine-Westphalia will once again be attending regular daily classes until the summer holidays. The distance rules and compulsory mouthguards are no longer applicable.
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But, they said that immediate security actions were conducted to prevent data theft or other malicious activities.
"We quickly launched an investigation into the event with the assistance of third-party forensic specialists, and began proactively taking certain systems offline," said the school website developer.
The latest security breach created a massive website outage, which affected around 5,000 customers. These include the school districts in Missouri, Illinois, and Kansas City.
Now, Finalsite's official website announced that most of the affected websites are back online. But, the company added that some pages may still experience laggings and other internal issues.
Why Finalsite Breach is a Big Deal
Reddit user U/flunky_the_majestic explained that the latest security breach against Finalsite affected essential class cancellation notifications, preventing them from being sent to students.
Because of this, many school districts complained that they cannot use their emergency notification system to inform communities about the class closures.
Aside from notifications, Finalsite also provided other issues created by the latest security breach:
- Website admin side issues.
- 503 website error messages.
- Missing styling, which we are still actively restoring.
In other news, a new iOS trojan malware is now targeting iPhone users. Meanwhile, Google released a new security patch to fix Android bug that affects 911 calls.
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Written by: Griffin Davis
