On December 28, PowerSchool discovered that its Student Information System (SIS) program had been compromised. Since then, more and more schools in the U.S. and Canada have been notifying parents and students that student information stored in the system — including a lot of historical data on former students — was involved in the breach.
Although it appears that PowerSchool paid the hacker’s demands and received assurance that the stolen data was deleted, savvy people point out that the word of a criminal cannot really be trusted.
While 60 million current and former students may be affected (the exact number is not known yet or confirmed by PowerSchool), current and former teachers were also affected. Fox8 in North Carolina reports:
More than 300,000 North Carolina teachers had their Social Security numbers exposed in a recent data breach involving educational platform PowerSchool, and are among millions of others, including students across the country, that are affected.
The North Carolina Department of Public Instruction said 312,000 teachers statewide are affected. Queen City News requested a county-by-county breakdown of the numbers of those affected, but one was not immediately available Thursday.
Read more on Fox8.