Case Study: Myerscough College achieves rapid ransomware recovery and 99% reduction in phishing with Barracuda Networks

Further education college bounces back from serious ransomware breach with cloud backup

Myerscough College, a further education college in north‑west England, was hit by a PYSA ransomware attack on 20 August 2020 that corrupted servers, domain controllers and storage—leaving the IT team with a single working laptop. The breach came amid a surge in phishing attacks and growing ransomware risk across the education sector, threatening teaching resources and day‑to‑day operations.

Because the college had already deployed Barracuda Cloud‑to‑Cloud Backup plus Barracuda Sentinel and Forensics & Incident Response, the IT team recovered key infrastructure and restored files to the day before the attack within days—avoiding payment of a ransom. The backup and incident tools saved teaching materials, supported legal data requests, streamlined remediation, and Sentinel blocked about 99% of phishing emails, significantly improving the college’s resilience.

Myerscough College

Ian Brown

Director of IT