It will take weeks before the educational institution ROC Mondriaan in The Hague will have its hacked computer system in order. The school does not know whether there is ransomware. The hack was discovered more than a week ago.
Now that ROC Mondriaan has remained silent about the situation, the VVD faction in the House of Representatives has asked many questions. MPs El Yassini and Rajkowski want clarity on this issue quickly. They asked the outgoing Minister of Education, Culture and Science, Ingrid van Engelshoven, what exactly is going on. It is feared that data from 20,000 students, 5,000 trainees and 2,100 employees has been stolen.
The only thing the school wants to say is that the advice has been followed to make all systems and files inaccessible. "The whole place has been shut down," the Hague school said.
Once the situation is clear, we will carefully start rebuilding the system safely and making it online. Critical company systems such as finance have been backed up , but it will take a few weeks to find out what was kept up.
Despite the major hack, students can go back to school. However, the digital aspect has temporarily disappeared. "We are going back to basics with pen and paper," said director Brigitte Laukens. She cannot report anything about the investigation into the hackers. "We don't know yet how they got in and whether they want a ransom or something else."
The impression is that ROC Mondriaan is the victim of ransomware . The MPs mentioned want to know whether the minister agrees that no ransom will be paid because crime should not be rewarded. At the beginning of 2020, Maastricht University did pay a ransom to cyber criminals. This has earned the university a lot of criticism.
In addition to the ROC Mondriaan and the University of Maastricht, the Arnhem-Nijmegen University of Applied Sciences (HAN) was also hit by hackers last week. A lot of personal data was stolen. It is still unclear how much personal data is involved. After the leak was found at the college, the police's High Tech Crime unit was immediately contacted. Because the investigation is now in full swing, HAN is not releasing much about the attack. HAN advises students and employees to keep an eye out for phishing.
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