Just think, they could have paid two engineers to fortify their systems against such an attack and still saved lots of money.
I watched a couple of presentations on security recently and just felt like we are all in a losing battle. There are always more bad actors, they get better and better, and they are a lot more motivated than any security team you can put together.
>The university said its staff restored from backups; however, the ransomware gang threatened to release student-related data online, which, in turn, made university management re-think their approach towards not paying the attackers.
This is why the vast majority of encryption-based ransomware puts a lot of effort into ensuring they really can decrypt your files after you pay them.
I assumed ransomware was always a class of attack wherein non backed up data was at risk.
This seems like a failed ransomware attack where the university just got unencrypted information stolen that they didn’t want released.
Ransomware is just the act of preventing access to data, with the access being reinstated after paying a fee to the attacker. Generally accomplished by encryption. Whether or not the victim has mitigations, backups, etc. holds no relevance to the class of attack.
>This seems like a failed ransomware attack
It's not really a failed ransomware attack. The attack was successful (they were able to encrypt some data), followed by successful reinstatement of access to the data by using backups, followed by successful extortion by the attacker.