Harris Federation is well known as an education charity firm that is connected with 50 primary and secondary schools and taught around 37,000 students living in London or nearby areas. However, the organization’s IT systems and email servers were infected by the ransomware attack executed on Saturday.

What Happened in this Attack?

This ransomware attack infected the school trust system and also compromise the encrypted Harris Federation’s IT system.

Once the organization is detected this attack, they disabled the email and landline phone systems and redirected all the phone calls to their mobile phones. The devices that were given to the students by the Harris Federation are also disabled to revoke the spread of this ransomware attack.

The officials said that this attack left multiple impacts on the academics and it will take time to know about the exact damage caused by this attack and we are taking every step to control the spread of this attack.

The organization is now working with the National Crime Agency and the National Cyber Security Center and with law firms that investigate the entire incident.

According to the experts, this is the 4th academy that was targeted this month and the organization will investigate the no of schools that was targeting using similar attacks. The organization said the schools and the institutions will remain open until the end of this current term.

Why these Attacks are Escalating?

These attacks are followed by the updated alert that was driven by UK’s National Cyber Security Centre that was issued on March 23 that warns about the increasing attacks that target the education institution from February.

This entire campaign of the ransomware attacks also leads to the other impacts that were targeted by the UK education sector last year during August and September.

In the list of impacted organizations, the Newcastle University is also hit by the DoppelPaymer ransomware attack. Whereas, two weeks ago, the FBI issued an advisory that described these increasing Pysa ransomware attacks that are targeted the educational institutions located in the United Kingdom and the United States respectively.

Summering Up

However, there is no official confirmation who is executing these attacks, but according to the experts this was done by the Revil ransomware operation organization but they haven’t got any proof against them to confirm this.

We also know that this Revil ransomware gang also hit Acer this month and demand the ransom of $50,000,000, which is the largest known ransom to date. Multiple law firms organization are working to catch the real hackers and stop these attacks.