The Lincoln County Board of Trustees will meet Thursday at 9 a.m. to approve contracts with two companies, CrowdStrike and Codeware.

This meeting will be in the boardroom of the district office at 233 East Monticello St.

The district was recently the victim of a ransomware cyber attack, which Superintendent Mickey Myers believes could be have been “spawned by an overseas group that utilizes malicious computer code to perpetrate these attacks.”

He said the attack “adversely affected multiple systems in our network” and administrators were working with the district’s IT department and legal counsel as well as multiple agencies and outside consultants that specialize in professional response to cyber crimes. The objective Tuesday and Wednesday was to restore core functions that are essential for day-to-day operation at the four attendance centers such as phones, bells, intercom and wireless internet to allow teachers to use Chromebooks for classroom management tasks.

Ransomware is technically not a virus, but a malicious software that encrypts files on computers or can lock the user out of the system. Viruses infect files or software and have the ability to replicate, but ransomware scrambles files and renders them unusable, and the hacker demands a monetary payment to restore use of the system.