LAKS exam complaint site down due to WannaCry ransomware

The server of the Exam Complaint site of the LAKS was taken hostage on Thursday by the WannaCry ransomware. The organization has not paid a ransom to get the files back, but has placed a backup on another server.

Examenklacht.nl was offline on Thursday afternoon for unknown reasons. Thursday night made it LAX known to work on a solution; students could report complaints about exams by telephone, was the advice. On Friday morning, the organization let know victim of an attack, but still have all the data.

In the afternoon Exam Complaint came online again. The organization confirms to the AD that it was indeed a WannaCry infection and that no payment was made to release the files. “Fortunately, we have a backup of all complaints about this year’s school exams. They were put on a different server this morning,” said a spokesperson.

The fact that the systems could become infected means that the servers were running a Windows version and that the administrators had not yet patched it. Currently, Exam Complaint is running on the IIS 10.0 web server of Windows Server 2016. Microsoft implemented the WannaCry protection patch for this Windows version in March, but it is not known what version the complaint site was previously running on.