The Medusa Ransomware Attack on St. Landry Parish School District

The Medusa ransomware gang has attacked St. Landry Parish School District. The St. Landry Parish School District is a public school system in St. Landry Parish, Louisiana. This district educates students across the parish, encompassing a mix of rural and urban communities. The curriculum spans pre-kindergarten through 12th grade, encompassing elementary, middle, and high school levels, as well as specialized programs and alternative education options. The educational offerings adhere to state and national standards, covering subjects like math, science, language arts, and social studies.

Medusa posted St Landry Parish School District to its data leak site on July 29th, threatening to publish a large amount of stolen data if the organization fails to pay a $1,000,000 ransom by August 8th. Medusa is a RaaS that debuted in the summer of 2021 and has evolved into one of the more active RaaS platforms in late 2022. The attackers restart infected machines in safe mode to avoid detection by security software and prevent recovery by deleting local backups, disabling startup recovery options, and deleting shadow copies.

Increased Activity and Tactics

Medusa ramped up attacks in the latter part of 2022 and became one of the more active groups in the first quarter of 2023. Medusa typically demands ransoms in the millions of dollars, which can vary depending on the target organization’s ability to pay. The Medusa RaaS platform (not to be confused with the operators of the earlier MedusaLocker ransomware) ransomware typically compromises victim networks through malicious email attachments (macros), torrent websites, or malicious ad libraries. Medusa can terminate over 280 Windows services and processes without command line arguments, and there may be a Linux version as well, but it is unclear at this time.

Target Industries and Double Extortion

Medusa targets multiple industry verticals, especially healthcare and pharmaceutical companies and organizations in the public sector. Medusa also employs a double extortion scheme where some data is exfiltrated prior to encryption, and they are not as generous with their affiliate attackers, only offering as much as 60% of the ransom if paid.