US school agrees to pay 20 bitcoins to escape blackmail

Administrators of the Horry County School District in South Carolina, USA, have agreed to pay 20 bitcoins worth $8,500 to anonymous hackers in order to restore computers, servers and networks affected by the ransomware. In the past week, hackers have taken control of the local school system's network and servers, including 25 servers at Horry County Elementary School. School employees found that they could not access some server data, and their IT staff took down all affected servers to prevent the ransomware from spreading to more computers, and shutting down the servers affected the school's online services.

School officials discovered that hackers were demanding 0.8 bitcoins for each computer, for a total of 20 bitcoins. The school's IT staff said the hackers broke into their network through an older server. Local South Carolina law enforcement and the FBI were involved in the investigation, but were unable to provide much help.

After spending countless hours trying to find a way to bypass the ransomware encryption, the school district administration has approved the payment of the ransom. Currently, the local school network, servers and computer use have returned to normal, which means that after paying the ransom, the school obtained the decryption key, allowing them to restore their files and network. Coincidentally, when the ransomware incident occurred, the school's administration was looking into hiring an external security provider to protect the network and computer security.