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S.C. School District Considers Paying Virus Ransom, Improving Security

Horry County Schools is still dealing with the aftermath of a virus that made district data inaccessible.

(TNS) CONWAY, S.C. — Two weeks after Horry County Schools computers were engulfed by a ransom virus, the Board of Education is discussing ways to make the district's system safer.

The district is still considering paying the $8,500 ransom to unlock all the encrypted files, according to Charles Hucks, executive director of technology. The money came out of the general fund budget.

The Board of Education discussed ways to improve the district's technological security in their Monday executive session. Hucks said the district did not want to talk about security details during a public session to prevent further breaches.

"Talking about the details would be like telling bad guys how to break in," Hucks said.

The virus didn't steal any data from the computers, so no student, parent or school records were breached, according to Hucks. The virus uses a high-level encryption to lock up data, then requires a key — with a monetary ransom — to unlock the data.

There's no easy way to avoid viruses because they are ever-changing, but the district is doing everything to improve their systems so this sort of ransom doesn't happen again, Hucks said. Beyond looking for anomalies and improving security access, there's not many more options.

"There's nothing really you can do," Hucks said.

All the school servers are back up and running, and almost everything students use is available again, Hucks said. A handful of district-based applications are still locked, along with internal servers used by district personnel.

"We've made a lot of progress, but depending on how much is still locked we may pay it," Hucks said.

The virus was discovered the morning of Feb. 8 and the district proactively shut down servers to prevent the virus from spreading, Teal Harding, district spokeswoman, said. District staff rebooted the computers over the next two weeks and most of the school-based data was already backed up, Hucks said.

"We had a better backup than we first thought," he said.

The virus came from another country, which is why state and federal investigators are involved, Harding said. It jumped into the district's computers through an old project management software that now houses project archives.

Much of the locked data was backed up, Hucks said, but staff is spending an incredible amount of time manually restoring and cleaning the data. It may be more cost-effective for the district to pay the ransom than pay for the overtime and manpower needed to restore everything by hand.

"It's very time consuming," Hucks said. "We're very likely to pay some or all of it eventually."

—2016 The Sun News (Myrtle Beach, S.C.), distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.