Ransomware attack shutters 157-year-old Lincoln College

A school that continued to go through two world wars, the Spanish flu epidemic of 1918 and the Great Depression closes on Friday, unable to stay afloat due to the persistent effects of the coronavirus crisis and a recent one ransomware attack.

Lincoln College – a historically the black university in rural central Illinois, which inaugurated President Abraham Lincoln’s birthday in 1865, tried, but failed, to raise enough money to recover from the combined impact of COVID-19 and a cyberattack. December, David Gerlach, president of the university, said in a statement.

“The loss of history, careers and a community of students and alumni is immense,” he said.

Lincoln, which has about 600 students, saw its enrollment drop after the coronavirus impact, disrupting its operations and finances. While the school struggled to stay afloat, a ransomware attack blocked access to the university for data used in student recruitment and retention, as well as fundraising efforts.

When Lincoln regained access to its key computer systems in March, estimates showed “significant enrollment deficits” that required a “donation or transformative partnership to keep Lincoln College beyond the current semester,” according to the statement. school.

The school, in Lincoln, Illinois, paid a ransom of less than $ 100,000 to recover data blocked by the attack, which originated in Iran, Gerlach told the Chicago Tribune in April. He also said Lincoln needs $ 50 million to stay open.

Word of Lincoln’s impending collapse sparked an effort by some students, faculty and alumni to raise money to keep the university open, by posting the hashtag #SaveLincolnCollege on social media.

“@elonmusk Lincoln College with this 2.2 MW solar farm has been horrified by Covid. We need a miracle gift in support as 1-7 predominantly black rural institutions in the US,” Gerlach wrote in a tweet tagged Elon Musk, the founding billionaire of electricity. Tesla car manufacturer.

A $ 20 million GoFundMe campaign has raised $ 2,452 as of Tuesday afternoon.

“I think if we had had more time, we could have found someone, but it’s all out of our control,” said Annette Roter, a Lincoln associate professor, in a Facebook post acknowledging that the campaign had failed. .

Colleges and universities are often ill-prepared for cyberattacks that encrypt digital information to make it unreadable until the target institution pays a ransom.

Last year, classes were disrupted in 1,043 U.S. schools due to ransomware attacks, including 62 school districts and 26 colleges or universities, according to an analysis by Emsisoft.

“While the cost of these incidents is impossible to estimate, it is certainly significant,” the New Zealand cybersecurity company said in a blog post, citing the approximately $ 8 million spent by public schools. of Baltimore County to recover from an attack in 2020.