Posts in the Education Sector Category at DataBreaches.net

Vermont schools lag on cybersecurity while risks hit home with $50K fraud from Pownal

Posted by Dissent at 1:21 pm Commentaries and Analyses, Education Sector, U.S.

Jul 162018

Nicole Higgins DeSmet reports:

A cyber thief infiltrated a Vermont supervisory union’s computer network and made a $50,000 transfer out of a school bank account, but safe guards on the account alerted staff members to take action.

“A more sophisticated thief or hacker could have spent the time to turn off alerts, make all bank emails go directly to the junk folder, and give the crime time to be effective,” Phil Sussman, cyber security expert and president of Norwich University’s Applied Research Institute wrote about the stealthy attack.

NJ: C-TEC: Student information may be impacted by data breach

Posted by Dissent at 8:36 am Education Sector, Hack, U.S.

Jul 152018

Bethany Bruner reports:

Students at the Career and Technology Education Center of Licking County may have had their personal information, including names and social security numbers, exposed to a hacker earlier this year.

Brian Wilfong, Public Relations and Marketing Coordinator for C-TEC, said the school first learned of a possible data breach on April 19.

Purdue data breach exposes personal info of 26K prospective students

Posted by Dissent at 9:05 pm Education Sector

Jul 122018

Ron Wilkins reports:

Personal information of 26,598 prospective Purdue students found its way to a parent of a possible student, Purdue spokesman Jim Bush said Thursday in a news release.

The file with the personal information was mistakenly sent to a parent of prospective student on May 17.

“While Purdue regrets this error, we have no reason to believe the information was improperly accessed or used given the prompt and thorough cooperation of the recipient and the limited nature of the disclosure,” Purdue officially stated in a news release.

Lake Oswego School District warns students about phishing email after employee account hacked

Posted by Dissent at 7:14 am Education Sector, Hack, U.S.

Jul 072018

KOIN 6 in Oregon reports:

The culprit had no problem drawing attention.

At 2:36 p.m., a tweet came out from the Lake Oswego School district Twitter account. In all caps, the tweet signaled a change in the account.

Screenshot of July 6 Tweet announcing LOSD hacked by @choppiq. Credit: KOIN6.

Read more on KOIN 6. This may be more than just a hack of the district’s Twitter account, however, as the day before, the email account of the district’s spokesperson, Christine Moses, had been misused to send phishing links to about 200 district students.

The Twitter account hacker did not mention the hacked email or phishing attempt, so it is not clear whether the two events or actors are connected, but the timing is certainly suggestive.

The @choppiq account calls itself “Bot-Net” and was created in June. It has no tweets.

@Choppiq Twitter account follows only 2 accounts and has yet to tweet from the account.

At this time, it is not clear what else any hacker(s) may have been able to access or compromise on the district’s system.

ZA: Eastern Cape’s massive schools data loss

Posted by Dissent at 1:10 pm Commentaries and Analyses, Education Sector, Non-U.S.

Jul 042018

Msindisi Fengu reports:

Nearly all data containing information about thousands of Eastern Cape schools, pupils and teachers were wiped out of a multimillion-rand digital filing system at the start of the year.

A report compiled by Sizwe IT Group, the company that installed and commissioned the Simplivity digital system that cost the provincial education department an estimated R20 million, found that between 20% and 30% of the data could not be recovered by the end of March.