Officials at the University of Calgary admitted this week that the school recently paid $20,000 CDN to rid its systems of ransomware that hampered productivity for 10 days.
Linda Dalgetty, the school’s VP of Finance and Services, acknowledged via press release on Wednesday that the school paid the ransom, which translates to roughly $15,756 USD, to maintain “all options to address system issues.”
According to the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, at a press conference on Tuesday she told a crowd the school paid the ransom “because we do world-class research here … and we did not want to be in a position that we had exhausted the option to get people’s potential life work back in the future if they came today and said, ‘I’m encrypted, I can’t get my files.’ We did that solely so we could protect the quality and the nature of the information we generate at the university.”
