U.S. schools and colleges spent $3.56 billion in estimated downtime and recovery costs from ransomware attacks last year, according to CNET.
Such significant costs have been reported by Comparitech even after double-digit percentage declines in the number of individual ransomware attacks aimed at educational institutions across the U.S., the number of affected schools and colleges, and the number of impacted students.
The findings also showed that ransomware-related downtimes lasted four days on average, while recovery spanned nearly a month on average.
Ransomware attacks against educational entities are expected to be lower this year, with documented attacks, as well as downtime and recovery timeframes on the decline, according to researchers.
"While hackers may be becoming more targeted in their approach, the lower downtime figures suggest schools are more prepared for these attacks and are better able to restore their systems from backups or mitigate the effects of the attacks," wrote researchers.
While 427,000 Fortinet devices running on FortiOS, FortiProxy, FortiSwitchManager, and FortiPAM iterations impacted by the critical CVE-2024-23113 flaw, another 62,000 FortiManager instances remain susceptible to attacks leveraging the CVE-2024-47575 bug, also known as FortiJump.
Initial access to the targeted SharePoint server through the flaw was leveraged to breach a Microsoft Exchange service account with elevated privileges, deploy the Huorong Antivirus, and install Impacket, resulting in the deactivation of legitimate antivirus systems and lateral movement.
Other Linux-based network devices may have also been targeted by Pygmy Goat, as indicated by its utilization of a fake Fortinet certificate, a pair of remote shells, and several communication wake-up techniques.