Charles Hucks, technology director of Horry County, South Carolina's school district, got a morning wake up call telling him that frozen computers and a cryptic message was spreading across computer screens.

Hackers had frozen 60% of the schools computers and the cryptic message was a ransom demand.

They said, 'Hey you want to free your data? Pay us,'" Hucks told CNN.

According to the FBI, they have received more than 2,453 complaints about ransomware hold-ups last year, costing the victims more than $24 million dollars. And they also acknowledge that many victims do not report the attacks.

The Horry County School District made a decision: "You get to the point of making the business decision: Do I make my end-users — in our case teachers and students — wait for weeks and weeks and weeks while we restore servers from backup? Or do we pay the ransom and get the data back online more quickly?"

Horry County then deposited the equivalent of $10,000 into the hackers' Bitcoin account and the school computer system was back up and running.

"It's a very bad trend that has been rising in the past few years," says Adam Kujowa, an expert for the software company Malwarebytes. "It's the one we see people asking for help about the most," he says. "And unfortunately, this isn't the kind of attack that you can get infected and you're done. There's no quick fix."

Source: Money.CNN