The good folks over at the Identity Theft Resource Center recently posted a very gracious thank-you to me and this site for helping track data breaches. I suspect that they’ll be pulling their hair out this weekend, though. 🙂 In addition to the 100 previously unreported breaches from 2009 that I posted here today, here…
Category: Education Sector
100 more breaches you probably never knew about in 2009
As noted here and elsewhere, the number of breaches reported in the media and other sources declined in 2009 relative to 2008, but newly obtained data suggests that once again, there was much that we did not know. During the period September 1 – December 31, 2009,  141 breach reports were received by the…
NY’s Higher Education Services Corp had its own breach last year
In discussing the huge Educational Credit Management Corp data breach previously covered on this site, Rick Karlin of the Times Union mentions a second and unrelated breach, this one by New York’s Higher Education Services Corp: [The breach] happened back in December when 1,433 e-mails from HESC ran into a “process error” by which the…
Boy, 9, accused of hacking into Fairfax schools’ computer system
Tom Jackman reports: Are you smarter than a third-grader? Because the online education system used by the Fairfax County public schools apparently is not. Police say a 9-year-old McLean boy hacked into the Blackboard Learning System used by the county school system to change teachers’ and staff members’ passwords, change or delete course content, and…
Confidential information about students left exposed in Education Ministry hallway
Or Kashti reports: Sensitive personal information about students, including psychological diagnoses and school evaluations, is being stored at an unsupervised location in a corridor of an Education Ministry building in Jerusalem. Any visitor who gets through the building’s initial security inspection, if he were so inclined, could look through the documents and even take them….
(follow-up) District Data Breach Leads to Prison Time
Dian Schaffhauser reports: A Washington State man has been sentenced to 10 years in prison after pleading guilty to 31 counts of criminal activity, most related to a school district data breach. Christopher Berge, now 21, was a student at Mountain View High School in Evergreen Public Schools when he “shoulder surfed”–physically observed–a password used…