Cybercriminals are attempting to extort education workers after a hack left their sensitive personal data at risk.
Early this year, an investigation from cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike determined that PowerSchool – which operates a widely-used Student Information System (SIS) – witnessed a data breach affecting millions of US school kids.
PowerSchool’s SIS software helps schools track students’ attendance, grades, addresses and oftentimes very specific personal information like Social Security numbers or health history.
PowerSchool disclosed that “current and former students and educators” had their names, contact details, dates of birth, limited medical alert information, Social Security numbers and “other related information” compromised.
Months later, state school leaders and employees from at least 20 North Carolina school systems have reported that hackers have attempted to extort them via threatening emails.
The NBC-affiliated WRAL News reports that the extortion attempt asks for a payment in cryptocurrency in exchange for keeping the victims’ data secret.
While PowerSchool says that the threat has been contained, cybersecurity expert Doug Levin said to “take that with a grain of salt.”
Says Levin,
“We also always encourage literally everyone, whether you’ve been caught up in this incident or not, to just freeze their credit records at the credit reporting agencies… It is a simple step that you can take to provide some measure of protection against financial fraud against yourself, should your information ever get exposed in a data breach like this one…
Incidents have been happening more frequently. They’ve been more sophisticated. They have also been more significant in terms of their impact, whether you’re talking about money or amounts, or the sensitivity of data that has been released.
And one of the things that school systems are doing now is also looking and asking questions of all of their vendors and third parties they do business with, like PowerSchool. There is certainly a trend right now that school systems are beginning to ask many more questions of their vendors and partners to ensure that they have strong cybersecurity in place, while school systems as well are shoring up their cybersecurity practices.”
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