Schools all around the UK have recently found out that the laptops that were given by the government actually arrived with certain viruses on them. These viruses were linked to servers over in Russia which then raised concerns that the hackers could in fact steal students' vulnerable data.
Russian hackers
According to the story by Telegraph, Employees over at the Bradford school had received a number of laptops aimed to help vulnerable students be able to study at home. An online forum then suggested that these machines actually contain malware that was installed by hackers.
The Department for Education or DfE had confirmed this incident and even wrote that the virus was spotted on a small number of those laptops that the government provided to the schools. A spokesperson said that in all of the known cases, the discovered malware was detected then removed at the point that the schools had turned on these devices.
Infected school laptops
Schools are now facing extra working days deleting the said software on these laptops in order for them to make sure that they are safe before the units are then sent out to the students according to a source. They then added that around 10% of the total laptops that they had received had contained the virus.
There were certain concerns that some of those computers were provided to the students even without proper checks. However, it's also thought that a particular number of the schools who had received the infected devices was just in the single figures and that the use of an in-built anti-virus software should be enough to block the malware from later on operating when those laptops were then turned on, according to the report of Metro.co.uk.
Schools now struggling to remove malware
The Bradford Council had contacted schools on Wednesday to give them warnings regarding the problem. They wrote that the network worm actually looks like it is in contact with Russian servers when it becomes active. A certain council employee then told schools to move quickly and treat the problem as a certain matter of urgency and to also check their networks for any given evidence pointing that they had been hacked.
A school IT employee coming from Wolverhampton said in an online forum that although bad news is not what the schools need at the moment, they have just fired up a bunch of these announcements to prep the schools and a number of them have already alerted that a certain worm has been found. An employee coming from the Lincolnshire school also wrote that they were able to detect viruses on the laptops that they had received from the Government.
The infected laptops were said to contain a certain variant of the known Gamarue virus that Microsoft gave a warning about. It was said that this virus can give a particularly malicious hacker immense control of the users' PC. This could then give the hackers access towards files as well as the computer's own web browser. However, the virus has not really been found to be able to gain access towards webcams or microphones.
Related Article: Over 400GB of 214 Million Social Media Users Have Been Exposed by 'Misconfiguration' from Chinese Company SocialArks
This article is owned by Tech Times
Written by Urian Buenconsejo
