With a cyber attack, unknown persons hit the school administration in the district of Munich and in the district of Berchtesgadener Land hard. Data from 75 schools that were stored on the servers of the Munich-Land media center have been encrypted with malware and are currently unavailable.
The Munich district office, where the media center is located, informed the 55 schools in the district of Munich and 20 in the Berchtesgadener Land on Monday about the attack, which took place last Thursday. These are mainly primary and secondary schools, but there are also a few secondary schools in the Munich district. New servers are currently being installed and work is being done to restore data. Among other things, names and address data as well as data on everyday school processes, such as timetables, are affected, which according to the Munich district office are currently not usable.
Backup files have also been destroyed
The district office announced that school operations were not affected. It is assumed that thanks to encryption technology, important data can be protected and not misused. According to the authority, other areas of administration that have a separate network at the media center are not affected.
According to the report, the attack with malware was discovered within a few minutes and all connections between the servers and to the Internet were immediately interrupted. However, even four days after the incident, the extent of the damage cannot yet be precisely determined. To make matters worse, the perpetrators struck just when storage media were connected to the server for backup due to a statistical deadline. These backup files were said to have been destroyed and can probably not be restored. The services of the decentralized school server (DSS) cannot currently be safely made usable again. Schools are advised to store data on their own servers. The media center announced that IT support would be provided. The state commissioner for data protection was informed of the process.