At the time, UAB worked with the Catalan Cybersecurity Agency, which joined the efforts on its own initiative, as well as the Data Protection Agency, the police, technology services provider S2Grupo, and Dell Technologies.

The university believes the attack vector was made possible by phishing a student’s credential. The result of the attack was 1,200 servers and 10,000 computers were out of service and more than 50,000 users were affected. 

Ignoring the ransom

Forensics by the Catalan Cybersecurity Agency found that corporate databases remained immune; therefore, academic records, financial information, all the personal information of the corporate staff remained safe. “The amount of data leaked, in the worst case, would have been minuscule.”