Caitlin Yamada
The Hinton Community School District and Wakefield Community School District were two of many districts through the nation impacted by the PowerSchool data breach in December.
PowerSchool Student Information System is a cloud-based platform utilized by school districts to manage operations, scheduling, lesson plans, student grades and more. On Dec. 28, PowerSchool was alerted to a cybersecurity incident that involved exportation of personal information that occurred on Dec. 22, according to a PowerSchool news release.
"For involved students and educators, the types of information exfiltrated in the incident may have included one or more of the following: the individual's name, contact information, date of birth, limited medical alert information, Social Security Number (SSN), and other related information," according to PowerSchool's news release.
The Hinton district and the Wakefield district were alerted to the incident on Jan. 7 by PowerSchool, stating they were one of the districts impacted. Wakefield alerted families On Jan. 10, and Hinton notified families on Monday.
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Ken Slater, Hinton superintendent, said their IT team confirmed that the following information may have been accessed:
-- For students: personally indefinable information such as dates of birth, addresses, medical alerts, and additional sensitive fields.
-- For staff: PowerSchool usernames and passwords, phone numbers, teacher numbers.
"PowerSchool has assured us there is no evidence of misuse or public dissemination of the breached data. Additionally, PowerSchool engaged CyberSteward, a professional advisor, who has provided reasonable assurances that the data has been deleted without further replication or dissemination," Slater wrote in a notice to the district.
Matt Farup, Wakefield superintendent, said they were informed the impacted data for them primarily consisted of parent and student contact information, such as names and addresses.
"Wakefield Community Schools stopped collecting and entering SSNs into our system years ago; however, data profiles for students and families from prior years may still include SSNs. It is important to note that no lunch account or banking information was accessed in this incident," Farup wrote in a post to the district's Facebook page.
In response to the breach, PowerSchool is offering two years of identity protection services to all students and educators whose information was involved as well as two years of credit monitoring services.
Hinton asked families and staff to change their PowerSchool passwords, monitor accounts, beware of phishing and update contact information in PowerSchool to ensure they received updates.
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Education and county government reporter
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