Los Angeles [US],October 4:A crime organization hacked into the Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD), the second largest school district in the United States, and released a huge amount of data stolen from the attack online, authorities confirmed.
KTLA news channel reported on Monday that the crime group, who had stolen more than 500 gigabytes of data from the school district during last month's hack, originally set Monday as the deadline for the school district to pay a ransom, but the data was published late Saturday night after LAUSD Superintendent Alberto Carvalho publicly announced that no ransom would be paid to the hackers.
"Paying ransom never guarantees the full recovery of data, and Los Angeles Unified believes public dollars are better spent on our students rather than capitulating to a nefarious and illicit crime syndicate," the district said Friday.
The authorities did not disclose what kind of data was stolen by the hacks, or what the attackers demanded exactly. KTLA said the district's employee health care and payroll apparently had been impacted.
The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) has warned other large school districts across the country about the threat of ransomware attacks following the hacking of LAUSD on Sept. 5.
Carvalho said in a statement Sunday that law enforcement and experts hired by the district were analyzing the full extent of the data released by the criminal organization. Meanwhile, staff from the district and parents questioned on social media platforms why the authorities did not inform the serious data leak to them before it was published by local news outlets.
LAUSD is the largest public school system in California and the second largest public school district in the country. During the 2020-2021 school year, LAUSD served 664,774 students, with 25,088 teachers and 50,586 other employees.
Source: Xinhua