Minnesota State University-Moorhead (MSUM) has been grappling with an internet outage for over two weeks, which has impacted students, faculty, and staff. University officials have now confirmed that the outage was caused by a ransomware attack. Upon discovering that several servers were not functioning as expected on February 1st, the MSUM IT team initiated their Incident Response plan, which involved taking various services offline to prevent further spread and to conduct a thorough investigation.
Subsequent analysis revealed that some servers had been encrypted and locked by ransomware, prompting MSUM to continue investigating the extent of the incident. Despite the severity of the attack, it has been determined that the affected servers did not contain sensitive personal data such as social security or credit card numbers. However, MSUM remains committed to monitoring their networks for any signs of malicious activity and will notify impacted individuals in accordance with data privacy laws if it’s discovered that personal information was accessed.
While the recovery efforts are ongoing, MSUM is working diligently to restore services, and those that have already been restored are deemed safe for use. Additionally, MSUM is advising students and employees to take proactive measures to enhance cybersecurity, including using unique passwords for different accounts, regularly changing passwords, implementing multi-factor authentication, and refraining from accessing restricted data from non-MSUM owned devices. Despite the challenges posed by the ransomware attack, MSUM expresses gratitude for the patience and resilience shown by students and employees throughout the recovery process, highlighting the university community’s grit and strength in overcoming adversity.
