‘Dirty, rotten, lowdown scoundrels’: Cyberattack forces NC school district to close
A Western North Carolina school district has paused classes after hackers hit its network, officials say.
Haywood County Schools said Wednesday the ransomware attack forced schools to “be closed for instruction for the remainder of the week.”
The district won’t have remote classes Thursday and Friday after being shut down since Monday, WYFF reported.
The district is based in Waynesville, roughly 30 miles southwest of Asheville.
The cyberattack was first discovered Monday, and technology experts from across the state and the National Guard have responded, the district said this week in a news release.
The hackers want the district to pay, but education officials don’t want to do so, news outlets reported.
“It is done by dirty, rotten, lowdown scoundrels,” Superintendent Bill Nolte said, according to WLOS.
The attack comes after Haywood County Schools announced it was starting the academic year with a mix of in-person and virtual learning due to the coronavirus pandemic.
As of Tuesday, staff computers were “not safe to use,” officials said in a news release.
“Our delay in restarting remote instruction is the uncertainty about the use of staff computers,” the district said at the time.
The school system this week was working with teachers to figure out if their devices were affected, according to officials.
The district says phones were down after the cyberattack, and service has since been restored at its main office. The ransomware didn’t impact personal computers, according to the district.
“The recent ransomware attack is requiring us to rebuild our entire network and related technology services,” Haywood County Schools wrote on Wednesday. “We are confident that we will have some Internet restored tomorrow. However, it is unlikely it will be viable at all locations until sometime next week.”
Officials as of Tuesday said they planned to report the attack to the FBI.
This story was originally published August 27, 2020 at 10:27 AM.
