Louisiana declares state of emergency in response to ransomware attack

Enlarge / To the credit of the three school districts affected, at least nobody's trying to pay the Danegeld. (credit: US Air Force / Adam Butterick)

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."

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