FinalSite suffered a ransomware attack that led to the disruption of thousands of school websites across the globe.
FinalSite offers hosting and development services to K-12 school districts and universities. The software-as-a-service (SaaS) provider claims that it is trusted by more than 8000 Schools in 115 countries.
On Tuesday, FinalSite’s clients (school districts) identified that their websites were inaccessible or showing errors.
Bleeping Computer reports that they were contacted by a School IT admin who said that FinalSite didn’t offer any details on when the services would be restored and were forced to send emails to parents alerting them about the outage.
Initially, FinalSite said that they were encountering error and performance issues across various services impacting majorly their Composer content management system.
However, following three days of disruption, the SaaS provider confirmed having found ransomware on their network that caused the outages.
FinalSite apologizing to its clients said,
“We are incredibly sorry for the prolonged outage and fully realize the stress it is causing your organizations. While we have made progress overnight to get all websites up and running, full restoration has taken us longer than anticipated”.
“The FinalSite security team monitors our network systems 24 hours a day seven days a week. On Tuesday, January 4, our team identified the presence of ransomware on certain systems in our environment”.
“We immediately took steps to secure our systems and to contain the activity. We quickly launched an investigation into the event with the assistance of third-party forensic specialists, and began proactively taking certain systems offline”
On Thursday, FinalSite on their Facebook page gave a status update saying an ongoing investigation shows at the moment there is no proof that data of the company or clients has been stolen.
FinalSite is working on restoring backup systems and bringing the network back to full performance.
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