For any individual within the ransom group, they can get a big payout by selling the data.
Messages between students and instructors? Likely pretty boring, but possibly embarassing or confidential for a given individual.
Grades? Could be a FERPA violation.
Critical PII such as SSNs? Probably not in the LMS to begin with.
Though I wouldn't be surprised if some 40 year old university IT system requires its use as an identifier, regardless of whether or not it gets printed anywhere.
Yikes.
But it is 100% happening.
People do amazingly stupid things with systems, especially when they don't have enough people with the expertise to set them up properly, so they just throw things in there without stopping to think about whether or not it's a good idea.
The only people it’s valuable for is the ransomee, because they don’t want the reputational hit of having their data everywhere.
You are leaking email addresses that likely otherwise wouldn't be out there publicly. Whilst email addresses and names are "effectively" public, they aren't just in a one big database anyone on the planet can access.
Every single one of those email addresses will receive increased spam and phishing attempts, with more isolated information (such as School, First+Last Name, Subjects, Teachers/Lecturers, etc) the phishing attempts can be more refined.
i.e, Student receives an email that looks like its from their school (has email footer, has student name, has relevant teacher name, subject name, etc), the user is now more likely to click some sketchy link.
These little identifiers add up, especially when cross-references with other leaks. Even more problematic when most of the users wrapped up in a leak like this are under 18 too.
A lot of this stuff could be done previously, although the effort and scale to do so would of been higher/harder.
They've already proved themselves to be untrustworthy simply by ransoming you in the first place.