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Illinois college, hit by ransomware attack, to shut down

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Re: Illinois college, hit by ransomware attack, to shut down

#11

Post by zamadatix »

The posting on the colleges website paints a much bleaker picture. The ransomware attack certainly didn't help but the school was already near shutting down due to huge drops in enrollment from covid and expenses related to implementing remote learning. It's not like they were just doing fine and didn't think to spend money on IT resulting in an untimely demise they were on the way out and also happened to get hit by ransomware during that. I wouldn't be surprised if they weren't doing particularly well prior to either of those issues even.

I wouldn't be surprised if there were multiple other things they should have been doing to lower operational risk but couldn't realistically do given their situation.

Re: Illinois college, hit by ransomware attack, to shut down

#12

Post by Wowfunhappy »

How did we end up at a point where we are this reliant on the internet?

Any truly critical system should not be connected to the public internet. Computers with internet connections are for sending email and reading Wikipedia. Any data critical to your organization should be accessed from separate terminals connected via LAN. No VPN, that's still the internet.

Do that, and unless you're the CIA you will never be hacked. You can even run Windows XP if you feel like it.

The internet is the root of the problem, and it's time we start realizing that some things shouldn't be online.

Re: Illinois college, hit by ransomware attack, to shut down

#13

Post by solveit »

zamadatix wrote: post #11

The posting on the colleges website paints a much bleaker picture. The ransomware attack certainly didn't help but the school was already near shutting down due to huge drops in enrollment from covid and expenses related to implementing remote learning. It's not like they were just doing fine and didn't think to spend money on IT resulting in an untimely demise they were on the way out and also happened to get hit by…

Of course. If the college was otherwise doing well, they would be able to get a loan to smooth over a rough patch.

Re: Illinois college, hit by ransomware attack, to shut down

#14

Post by Loughla »

Hey, I actually have experience with that school! I did some consulting with them about a decade ago.

The ransomware attack certainly didn't help, but it is wildly misleading to say, or even imply that caused them to shut down.

The actual reasons:

(a) They filled a niche that didn't need to be filled anymore. They used to absorb students from other local universities (ISU, UIS, UIUC). Those schools have realized the value of helping their own students be successful, leading to declining enrollment.

(b) They were previously a community college, and began awarding bachelor's degrees. They were then fighting in a weight class way above what they were used to, and never really got their feet under them (to use some mixed metaphors).

(c) They were expensive for the quality. They gave a good education, but had zero connections to business and industry to justify the cost.

(d) They had a pipeline from Chicago's south and south-east side that has recently been sniped by large state schools, leading to a decline in enrollment.

For context, I worked with them on enrollment management and declining enrollment a decade ago.

Re: Illinois college, hit by ransomware attack, to shut down

#16

Post by GreedCtrl »

The college in question is Lincoln College.

This is somewhat confusing because there is a college called Illinois College. Because of this news, they are accepting transfers from Lincoln for all students in good academic standing: https://www.ic.edu/news/04-4-2022/illinois-college-extends-b...

Re: Illinois college, hit by ransomware attack, to shut down

#17

Post by jacobr1 »

Wowfunhappy wrote: post #12

How did we end up at a point where we are this reliant on the internet? Any truly critical system should not be connected to the public internet. Computers with internet connections are for sending email and reading Wikipedia. Any data critical to your organization should be accessed from separate terminals connected via LAN. No VPN, that's still the internet. Do that, and unless you're the CIA you will never be hack…

The problem is that much (not all) the business important data is involved the public internet. Take this school for example - prospective students applied online. One could imagine sneaker-netting the application data to an airgapped network, but that introduces its own costs and risks.

Email (or other messages systems like slack) are one of primary tools of business, facilitating communication within an organization. You can't do that well with an air-gapped network, except to make that network really leaky.

Re: Illinois college, hit by ransomware attack, to shut down

#18

Post by zamadatix »

Wowfunhappy wrote: post #12

How did we end up at a point where we are this reliant on the internet? Any truly critical system should not be connected to the public internet. Computers with internet connections are for sending email and reading Wikipedia. Any data critical to your organization should be accessed from separate terminals connected via LAN. No VPN, that's still the internet. Do that, and unless you're the CIA you will never be hack…

Having worked in healthcare up until very recently I can assure you a bunch of unpatched XP machines connected via LAN will still be rampantantly infected regardless if they have access to the internet. Wannacry was just absolutely rampant on these systems for years. At the same time the publicly inbound accessible servers in the DMZ never had an issue because we were actually able to manage the security controls on those.

The LAN is a much more used attack vector than the internet. It has nothing to do with some hacker sitting there banging at your door users just share files and reuse devices as part of their day to day effort. The instant someone in the college brings in a compromised USB, intentionally or unintentionally, all of the isolation in the world from the internet doesn't save you from ransomware.

Re: Illinois college, hit by ransomware attack, to shut down

#19

Post by duped »

toomuchtodo wrote: post #9
duped wrote: post #7

It sounds like they weren't in a great financial situation to begin with. Definitely a tragedy to have everything down for three months and to find out afterwards that you're not going to have enough money to stick around next year. I wonder what the ransom was and if they paid it. Side note: Planet Money had an interesting segment on insurance claims for things like cyber attacks last week, it's worth giving a liste…

Cyber insurance premiums are skyrocketing YoY due to ransomware attacks based on conversations with clients. Overall, it’s still a challenge to demonstrate the value of defending against them (reducing attack surface, real backups and data recovery plans, phishing exercises to see who is click happy and what their privileges have access to, etc) to folks who don’t understand the risk this poses. Like driving without…

The point they made was some insurance companies consider state sponsored cyber attacks as "acts of war" under their terms and not covered in their policies. It was part of a larger segment on how insurers do or don't insure catastrophic events, like pandemics or war.

Re: Illinois college, hit by ransomware attack, to shut down

#20

Post by Wowfunhappy »

jacobr1 wrote: post #17
Wowfunhappy wrote: post #12

How did we end up at a point where we are this reliant on the internet? Any truly critical system should not be connected to the public internet. Computers with internet connections are for sending email and reading Wikipedia. Any data critical to your organization should be accessed from separate terminals connected via LAN. No VPN, that's still the internet. Do that, and unless you're the CIA you will never be hack…

The problem is that much (not all) the business important data is involved the public internet. Take this school for example - prospective students applied online. One could imagine sneaker-netting the application data to an airgapped network, but that introduces its own costs and risks. Email (or other messages systems like slack) are one of primary tools of business, facilitating communication within an organizatio…

I totally get it, but the internet hasn't been around that long. How did we handle this 30 years ago?

I imagine students applied via snail mail, and then someone manually entered the information into a database. There's no reason to go back to paper applications, and that database should absolutely be digital—but I think we could do a lot more manual entry.

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