Cyber criminals hacked school and demanded ransom

It happened on 16 July after the IT department "noticed something peculiar on the system"

Staff at Lancaster Royal Grammar School spent the summer holidays rebuilding the entire IT system after a cyber attack forced them to shut it down.

It happened on 16 July after the IT department "noticed something peculiar on the system".

None of the most sensitive systems - pupil databases, safeguarding or finance - were affected, but it was still "pretty serious disruption" head Dr Christopher Pyle said.

Ten schools across the Fylde were subjected to a similar ransomware attack - a form of malicious software that encrypts files - earlier this month.

'Deliberate attack'

Dr Pyle said: "It happened the day before the school broke up for the summer holidays so to the pupils' amazement, they broke up a day early.

"Fortunately it had virtually no impact on them.

"IT had noticed something peculiar on the system, so they started to shut down bits of the system.

"After a couple of hours they noticed something bigger was going on and it looked like a deliberate attack, so they shut the system down."

The school contacted their cyber insurance police staff who were "excellent" and "within an hour we had experts on a call giving advice".

The whole system was "rebuilt from scratch with added security", Dr Pyle said.

"We'd never had to test the system before, but fortunately there was no lasting damage."

He said the attack "appeared to be a professional group".

"We had information saying they wanted us to pay a ransom, but the school did not interact with any demands so we don't know completely who it came from," he added.