AASD provides update on December cyberattack

Hackers reportedly demanded ransom from district

Altoona Area School District officials said hackers on Dec. 3 obtained 150 gigabytes of data, including employee information, and posted 10 GB of it to the dark web.

According to district Community Relations Director Paula Foreman, it is suspected that employees' names, addresses, dates of birth, Social Security numbers and medical IDs were compromised.

Superintendent Charles Prijatelj said that information is "the only compromised data that could have had any kind of value."

"They didn't get that far," Prijatelj said, adding that the district faces about 100 such attacks weekly, though most are not successful.

Still, Prijatelj said the hackers were able to encrypt the district's routing server before its security systems locked them out.

"Our system is bombarded on a regular basis," Prijatelj said.

The district ran diagnostics and "state of the art" threat software on its entire system, Prijatelj said, and is working with Arete, a cybersecurity company, amid the ongoing investigation.

The FBI was notified of the security breach.

Prijatelj said the district negotiated with the perpetrators, who demanded ransom, for about nine weeks.

According to Prijatelj, it is unlawful for a public entity to pay ransom.

Prijatelj is encouraging people to take measures to secure their data, including putting dual authentication on all major credit cards and having access to fraud alerts on their Social Security numbers.

"We live in a world of convenience, and, with that, comes exposure," Prijatelj said. "You want to limit exposure; it's the age we live in."

"We are doing everything in our power to ensure the security of our employees' data," Prijatelj said. "We've added layers of security to ensure this doesn't happen again."

Prijatelj said medical ID cards for all employees have been ordered and should be received within the next few weeks. Additionally, he said, in the next few weeks, free credit monitoring services will be available for impacted employees for up to two years.

Mirror Staff Writer Andrew Mollenauer is at 814-946-7428.