Following a Feb. 8 ransomware attack, Oakland, Calif., is still working to secure its infrastructure and restore government services.

Cybersecurity firm Emsisoft’s tally of publicly disclosed ransomware attacks in 2022 included 105 counties, 45 school districts, 44 colleges and universities, and over two dozen healthcare providers.

The Government Accountability Office (GAO) said in a Nov. 16 report that Federal agencies need to up their ransomware assistance for state, local, Tribal, and territorial (SLTT) government organizations – including schools – by improving interagency collaboration, awareness, outreach, communication, and coordination with schools.

A new report from the Government Accountability Office (GAO) found that Federal agencies are successfully helping state, local, tribal, and territorial (SLTT) governments prevent and respond to ransomware attacks; however, there is still room to improve collaboration. The GAO offered three recommendations for Federal agencies to improve collaboration.

Federal officials urged state and local government and education leaders this week to focus on some of the Federal government’s top existing resources in the fight against ransomware attacks – including one principle that’s easy to say but harder to do – don’t meet ransom demands.

The Federal government’s Joint Ransomware Task Force (JRTF) kicked off its inaugural meeting with a discussion of new initiatives to collaborate with state, local, tribal, and territorial entities to protect against ransomware intrusions and disrupt malicious actors, according to a September 14 press release from the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA).

The Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD) is still taking steps to recover from a ransomware attack on its IT systems last week.

The number of ransomware attacks on both K-12 and higher education institutions increased in 2021, according to a new report from Sophos, a global cybersecurity leader.

As cyberattacks become more frequent and costly to remediate, the COVID-19 pandemic has spread state and local governments’ (SLG) cyber defenses thin and just 18 states have a specified cybersecurity budget, according to a report by cybersecurity awareness training platform KnowBe4.

Ransomware continues to be the biggest issue for most K-12 school districts across the country, according to Doug Levin, co-founder and national director of the K12 Security Information Exchange.