Baltimore County Schools Hacked (BCPS)

Baltimore County Schools Hacked, By Dangerous Ransomware

BALTIMORE COUNTY (WBFF) - Baltimore County Public Schools were closed Wednesday following a ransomware cyberattack. Details of the attack are being investigated, but it could have a major impact on virtual learning.

What happened to Baltimore County Schools is not uncommon. In September, Virginia’s largest school system, Fairfax County, was hacked. Earlier this year, Nevada’s largest school system, Clark County, was hacked. Now, America’s 24th largest school system, Baltimore County, is the latest target.

Project Baltimore spoke with Brian Dykstra, the CEO of Atlantic Data Forensics in Elkridge, which specializes in defending against ransomware. He says ransomware attacks are on the rise during the COVID pandemic. He tells FOX45 News it’s a criminal business and it’s thriving.

Dykstra told Project Baltimore the hackers who attacked Baltimore County Schools have likely been in the system for weeks, finding out where everything is and planning when to send out the ransomware to encrypt the district’s data. There are several ways the system could have been hacked, but Dykstra says remote learning may have made the school system an easier target.

“They pushed out remote access to everybody really quickly with the goal being get everybody covered as quickly as possible, right?” explained Dykstra. “Did they do it in the most secure way possible? Unfortunately, the answer for a lot of organizations is that they didn’t. They did whatever was most expedient but not most secure.”

Dykstra says organizations should be spending roughly four to six percent of their budget on IT security. But, in his experience, organizations tend to underfund their IT departments.

“It’s really a management problem, right?” said Dykstra. “It’s usually because there has been a decision made of not funding IT.”

Project Baltimore looked at the Baltimore County Schools budget and found, since 2016, the amount of money BCPS put toward Network Support Services has more than tripled from $6 million to $23 million currently. That works out to about one percent of the school system’s budget, and keep in mind, remote learning has increased the system’s network needs.

We don’t know the full extent of this attack and what will be affected. The hackers could have emails, payroll, or student records. The best hope, Dykstra says, is the school system has good backups. Dykstra believes this will determine whether the system should just pay the ransom. But either way, he says, there’s no quick fix.