Howard University in Washington, D.C. has canceled classes for at least one day after a ransomware attack infected the school’s IT systems.
The hackers may have tried to exploit the Labor Day weekend—when employees take time off—to attack the school. University staff first noticed the attack on Friday, and shut down the school's network to prevent the infection from spreading.
“We are currently working with leading external forensic experts and law enforcement to fully investigate the incident and the impact,” Howard University wrote in a statement. To give the school’s IT team more time to address the incident, the school also decided to cancel classes on Tuesday. In addition, the campus’s Wi-Fi system has been shut down.
Howard University didn’t immediately respond to comment. But the school is likely concerned the hackers still have a presence within the school’s IT network. So letting students and staffers connect to the campus network could help the ransomware attack proliferate even more.
How the hackers infiltrated the school’s network remains unclear. However, cybercriminals can exploit vulnerabilities in IT systems or use phishing emails to launch a ransomware attack. The goal is to then spread the ransomware to as many computers as possible and encrypt all the information onboard. To free the computers, a victim must then pay up, sometimes in hundreds of thousands of dollars, in order to receive a decryption key.
In some cases, the hackers will also steal confidential information from the victim’s network and threaten to leak it out. For now, Howard University says there’s no evidence any personal information was accessed, but the investigation remains ongoing.
The incident occurs days after the FBI and US cyber authorities noted an increase in “highly impactful ransomware attacks” in the US occurring on the holidays and the weekends—when offices are normally closed. In response, the FBI published an alert in the run-up to the Labor Day holiday, warning organizations to stay on guard.