Quote from: BitcoinDistributor on March 25, 2015, 07:01:07 AM

In all seriousness, what random school district would have $125,000 to pay a ransom? Over half of states can't even afford giving the typical 3% cost of living raise a year. I know in my state, teachers haven't gotten a raise in a couple years now.

Yeah kinda silly asking for this much. I could understand maybe a few thousand and they'd have more chance of getting some money out of them then as it would likely just be easier to pay up.

Quote from: Lorenzo on March 25, 2015, 06:27:11 AM

So is the data backed up or not? If it is backed up, then simply restoring the files should be pretty trivial. If it isn't backed up and the files in question are actually encrypted, then they would be powerless to do anything about it other than paying the ransom or doing a complete reformat.

It's very likely they did have backups. I think most half decent schools or universities will have a good enough IT department to know to back up their files. There's a lot of valuable info that could get lost if they didn't.