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A ransomware attack on the Los Angeles Unified School District in the first week of September crippled digital operations across the system, which includes more than 1,000 schools and serves roughly 600,000 students. Two weeks after the initial attack, as the district worked to recover and restore its systems, the hackers said that they would leak the 500 gigabytes of data they claimed to have stolen from LAUSD if the school system didn’t pay a ransom.
After the school system refused to pony up, the hackers released the trove, which contained sensitive data of students who had attended LAUSD between 2013 and 2016, including their Social Security numbers, financial and tax information, health details, and even legal records. And as LAUSD set up a hotline for worried families and scrambled to deal with the fallout, the hacking group behind the attack moved on, seemingly without making any money off the incident.
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