Ransomware criminals are dumping kids’ private files online after US school hacks

Ransomware gangs have been stealing confidential documents from schools and dumping them online. — AP Illustration/Peter Hamlin

The confidential documents stolen from schools and dumped online by ransomware gangs are raw, intimate and graphic. They describe student sexual assaults, psychiatric hospitalisations, abusive parents, truancy – even suicide attempts.

“Please do something,” begged a student in one leaked file, recalling the trauma of continually bumping into an ex-abuser at a school in Minneapolis. Other victims talked about wetting the bed or crying themselves to sleep.