The Vice Society gang has claimed responsibility for the weekend ransomware attack on Los Angeles Unified (LAUSD), the country’s second-largest school district. LAUSD claims to enroll over 640,000 students from kindergarten to 12th grade, and it includes Los Angeles and areas from 31 smaller municipalities, as well as some unincorporated areas of Los Angeles County.
The Vice Society operation claimed responsibility for the LAUSD ransomware attack but refused to provide proof until they published an entry on their data leak site according to Bleeping Computer. In addition, the attackers claimed to have stolen files from compromised LAUSD systems before encrypting them with ransomware. “We have 500 GB of data from their network,” said a Vice Society representative to Bleeping Computer, who refused to provide proof of the stolen data.
While the Los Angeles school district has yet to link the incident to a specific ransomware group, the FBI, CISA, and MS-ISAC published a joint advisory warning of Vice Society disproportionately targeting the US education sector on the same day it disclosed the ransomware attack.
Additionally, the California Governor’s Office of Emergency Services (CalOES) Homeland Security Division and the California Cybersecurity Integration Center (Cal-CSIC), a multi-agency center that leads California’s cybersecurity response efforts, emailed local government agencies and education entities in the state to notify them of this advisory.
In an effort to #StopRansomware, the #FBI and @CISAgov issued a joint #CybersecurityAdvisory about the Vice Society ransomware threat. It recommends steps organizations should take to reduce the likelihood of ransomware incidents. https://t.co/APJRyz2eTx pic.twitter.com/qHgeQBBns5
— FBI (@FBI) September 6, 2022
