The University of Utah says it paid extortionists almost half a million dollars after a ransomware attack on some of its computer servers. The college is telling students, staff and faculty to change their university passwords.
The university says in a statement it paid $457,000 to an “unknown entity” that hacked the College of Social and Behavioral Science servers on July 19, rendering them “temporarily inaccessible." The cyber criminals encrypted about 0.02% of the data stored there before the U.’s Information Security Office detected the attack.