The southern Maastricht University in Netherland that fell victim to a major ransomware assault has partly received back its stolen money, a local news organization reported on Saturday.
The Dutch University suffered a large cyberattack in 2019 that locked them, and their students, out of valuable data until they agreed to pay a €200,000 ($208,000) ransom in Bitcoin which hackers demanded to decrypt the data.
"The criminals had encrypted hundreds of Windows servers and backup systems, preventing 25,000 students and employees from accessing scientific data, library and mail," the daily De Volkskrant told.
"After a week the university decide to accede to the criminal gang's demand," the paper said. This was partly because personal data was in danger of being lost and students were unable to take an exam or work on their theses.”
As part of an investigation into the cyberattack, local police traced part of the ransom paid to an account belonging to a money launderer in Ukraine. In 2020, the authorities seized the perpetrator's account, which contained a number of different cryptocurrencies including part of the ransom money paid by Maastricht University.
Earlier this week, the authorities were able to return the ransom back to the university. But the value of the Bitcoin held in the Ukrainian account has increased from its then-value of €40,000 to €500,000.
"When, now after more than two years, it was finally possible to get that money to the Netherlands, the value had increased from 40,000 euros to half-a-million euros," the paper further read. Maastricht University will now get the 500,000 euros ($521,000) back.
"This money will not go to a general fund, but into a fund to help financially strapped students," Maastricht University ICT director Michiel Borgers stated.
The administrators of Maastricht University should count themselves lucky as they were able to retrieve their stolen money. Last year, the University of California paid $1.14 million to NetWalker attackers after they encrypted data within its School of Medicine’s servers, and the University of Utah paid hackers $457,000 to prevent them from releasing data stolen during an attack on its network.
In 2021, ransomware attackers targeted 58 U.S. education organizations and school districts, including 830 individual schools, according to the report published by Emsisoft threat analyst Brett Callow. Emsisoft estimates that in 2020, 84 incidents disrupted learning at 1,681 individual schools, colleges, and universities.
