Ransomware chaos hits Richmond, Oneonta school districts as cyberattacks pile up

Richmond Public Schools in Virginia continues to battle widespread disruptions for the fifth day, while another school district hundreds of miles away in Oneonta, New York, closed its doors for two days following a separate attack.

Despite widespread network outages and ransom notes appearing on school laptops, Richmond school officials kept doors open at all 53 campuses across the district.

The Oneonta City School District (OCSD) was forced to cancel school for all students on both Friday and Monday, with officials announcing that schools would reopen on Tuesday.

Both attacks come amid a string of breaches targeting US schools and EdTech providers throughout October, including one Idaho district where attackers took control of school cameras, door locks, and HVAC systems.

Richmond forced back to paper

With nearly 22,000 students, Richmond Public Schools (RPS) is among the 100 largest school divisions in the US.

School officials first announced the Richmond schools ransomware attack on October 21, after teachers woke up to a ransom note plastered across their laptops, with no access to Wi-Fi, cameras, phones, copying, Smartboards, Chromebooks, or the PowerSchools learning platforms.

The hackers threatened to leak the allegedly stolen information unless the district made contact within 72 hours.

We have gained access to your network, extracted sensitive data, and encrypted your critical files.

This situation demands immediate attention from your leadership team,

the unknown ransomware group wrote.

Now, five days later, the district's network access remains unavailable, and on Monday, RPS announced that teachers and students were still operating without normal digital resources.

Thanking teachers for their "resilience, flexibility, and dedication," RPS Superintendent Jason Kamras posted an update on the district website Monday about progress made to access learning materials while the systems were still down.

To keep classes running, the district enlisted three outside printing companies to produce physical teaching materials for students, according to a report by Axios.

RPS said it had also received help from the Richmond Public Library to print classwork and is now working with school copy machine vendors to get them back up and running.

Out of an abundance of caution while our ongoing investigation continues, we are offering free credit monitoring to all RPS staff, students, and families.

Richmond Public Schools Superintendent Jason Kamras said in a Monday update.

Additionally, the district said it was able to establish a secure alternate network accessible via Chromebooks, with those laptops being issued to teachers late Monday or Tuesday.

"All teachers should be receiving Chromebooks today or tomorrow to allow them to access all RPS platforms," Kamras said, adding that HDMI cables would also be distributed to connect the computers to digital classroom displays.

Oneonta shutters schools after ransomware attack

Meanwhile, in upstate New York, the Oneonta City School District (OCSD) is recovering from a ransomware attack that forced the district to close schools for two days.

The incident was first discovered on Thursday, October 22nd, with the district initially believing it was dealing with an internal technology problem.

Officials later confirmed that the disruption was caused by ransomware, prompting the district to cancel classes Friday and again Monday while third-party experts were brought in to investigate.

Oneonta schools Superintendent Thomas Brindley told AllOtsego, the local hometown paper, on Monday that “the district is working with outside experts to determine the full scope of the breach and restore normal operations.”

At this time, we do not yet know the full extent of the incident or its potential impact on district operations.

We understand that news of a ransomware attack may raise questions and concerns.


As we learn more and are able to share additional information, we will continue to communicate openly with our families and staff,

Oneonta schools Superintendent Thomas Brindley told a local media outlet.

As of Monday, it’s unknown whether student, employee records, or personal information were compromised.

Classes are expected to resume on Tuesday, October 27th.

The Oneonta district serves a much smaller number of students at only 1,700 students across five schools, grades kindergarten through high school.

No ransomware gang has been identified in either attack, and it’s unclear if either district made contact or paid their attackers.