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Ransomware joins winter storms and coronavirus scares on a list of problems that have already disrupted schools across the country in the new year.

Finalsite, a school website services platform, was hit by a ransomware attack earlier this week. The platform said on Twitter on Tuesday that its security team has detected ransomware on certain systems and is working to prevent another attack.

Finalsite spokesperson Morgan Delack said the platform took its system offline instead of waiting for the attackers to cause more damage.

“We went proactively offline as soon as we found out what was going on to protect and secure our data,” Ms Delack said in an email on Friday. “In doing so, we took nearly 5,000 school websites offline and rebuilt them in a new, secure environment. It took a while to get up and running since there was a complete restructuring of the data. Currently, most of our websites are back online in this new secure environment.”

Finalsite serves more than 8,000 schools and universities in more than 115 countries, according to its website. Some of these agencies were still reporting problems as of Friday morning.

For example, Tulsa Public Schools in Oklahoma said via Twitter that it has functionality issues on its website due to Finalsite cyber issues.

Ms Delack said Finalsite was working with a forensic expert to investigate the attack and that Finalsite had no evidence that the data was compromised. He cited the ongoing investigation as the reason the cyberattack did not answer questions about him and said it could take up to two weeks for the investigation to be completed.

Educational institutions have become a popular target for ransomware attackers as the coronavirus pandemic pushes more students to learn remotely. Ransomware attacks on K-12 schools increased at the start of the 2020 school year, according to the Multi-State Center for Information Sharing and Analysis (MS-ISAC), published on the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency’s website.