Illinois Valley Community College recently had servers shut down by a cyberattack.
The school hired cybersecurity firms to get to the root of the ransomware and make sure confidential records are safe.
The servers have been down since April 24. The school hopes to have more answers soon on how and why hackers got into their system.
The attack primarily affected the college’s email servers, website and administrative software.
Jerry Corcoran is the president of IVCC. He says, thankfully, the Blackboard servers that professors use for e-learning were unaffected.
“It sure made things more difficult for people communicating with email and all that -- I couldn't begin to emphasize that point,” said Corcoran.
The school says they aren’t aware of any private information that could have been exposed.
IVCC also set up an alternative email server for students to communicate with their teachers.
Corcoran also says he hopes the case can lend useful information to other universities targeted by malware and data breaches.
“We're all susceptible, even a college like IVCC, that we had just been through a security audit,” he said.
Other Illinois schools, including the College of DuPage, have recently experienced data breaches and ransomware attacks.
Corcoran says the college hopes to know the results of the security scans in the coming days.