MOORHEAD, Minn. (Valley News Live) – An internet outage that’s been affecting students, faculty and staff at Minnesota State University-Moorhead for more than two weeks was caused by a ransomware attack, according to university officials.
On Thursday, February 1, the MSUM IT team discovered that some servers were not performing as expected. They immediately activated the Incident Response (IR) plan, which includes taking services offline – including university file servers, printing and the MSUM website, to prevent spread and perform a more extensive investigation.
Upon further review, it was discovered a few servers were encrypted and locked by ransomware. The full extent of the incident continues to be under investigation.
According to MSUM, at this time, the forensics analysis indicates that the affected servers did not house sensitive data like social security or credit card numbers. If it is determined that personal information was accessed, MSUM says they will notify impacted individuals in accordance with the Minnesota Government Data Practices Act and other applicable law.
Kirsten Jensen, AVP of Communications at MSUM, says they were advised not to say anything until they knew for sure this was a cyber attack. “Not being able to talk about this left a space for perception that our IT team was struggling, or weren’t handling the situation well, but just the opposite is true,” she mentions.
Based on analysis, no other Minnesota State college or university has been affected and MSUM continues to monitor their networks for malicious activity.
The university says they continue to restore services and those that have been restored are safe to use. You can find updates about the recovery process and available services here.
Although MSUM is not aware of any misuse of information, they recommend students and employees don’t use the same password for multiple accounts, change passwords regularly, implement multi-factor authentication wherever possible, and do not access restricted or highly restricted data from non-MSUM owned devices.
Ransomware is a form of malware that is used to prevent users from accessing files, and in some cases, extract and hold data hostage until a ransom is paid. Ransomware attacks have become increasingly pervasive in recent years, often times with education systems and state and local governments becoming a primary target. It is Minnesota State Colleges & Universities policy that institutions do not pay ransom.
Jensen expresses her gratitude to students and employees having patience as they try and restore their servers: “In challenging times, you definitely find out what you’re made of. I think it’s been great to know Dragons are made of grit and heart. We’ve been able to get through this in a way that will just make us stronger.”
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