On November 3, Lakeside School provided a notification to the Massachusetts Attorney General’s Office about a data breach. Lakeside School is a private school for grades 5-12 in the Seattle, Washington area.
Because Massachusetts does not require inclusion of the kinds of details this site reports, we have almost no information on this breach other than this statement:
We are writing to notify you of a data security incident involving some of your personal information including your name and medical information. This notice explains the incident, measures we have taken and some steps you can take in response. While we have no indication that your information was actually viewed by the unauthorized person, or that it was misused, we wanted to notify you of this incident and assure you that we take it very seriously.
We remind you to remain vigilant to the possibility of fraud by reviewing your credit reports and financial statements for any unauthorized activity. For more information on additional steps you can take in response to this incident, please see the page that follows this letter.
We sincerely regret any inconvenience caused by this incident. If you have any questions, please call 1-800-939-4170, Monday through Friday, between 6:00 am and 6:00 pm, Pacific Time. Your trust in and ongoing support of Lakeside School are invaluable to us. Thank you.
There does not seem to be any notice on their web site about any incident, and there is no notification that appears on the web site for the Washington State Attorney General where breach notices are publicly posted. But looking at the letterhead and return address for the notification to Massachusetts, Lakeside may have retained IDX to provide services to those impacted.
DataBreaches.net sent email inquiries yesterday to the directors of both the Middle and Upper schools to ask for information about the report to Massachusetts, but has received no reply by the time of this publication. This post will be updated if a reply is received.
As a reminder, medical information held by schools is usually not covered under HIPAA but under FERPA, but this is a private school and it’s not clear whether this was student medical information or employee medical information, or what.
We are really pretty much in the dark about this one so far.