Last week, the Specialised Commercial Crime Court of East London, Eastern Cape, handed down a prison sentence of three years to a hacker who stole just under R600 000 from the province’s education department. The crime took place in 2013, when Bruce Owen, in his thirties at the time, broke into the inner workings of…
Category: Education Sector
Update: Tucson Unified School District sends out notifications about January cyberattack
There’s another update to the January cyberattack on TUSD by the Royal ransomware group. While the district was still claiming that sensitive data hadn’t been compromised, data from employees was already being leaked on the dark web as early as February. In the last week of August, TUSD sent out notifications to 28,948 people and…
Rochester Public Schools announces cause behind spring cyberattack
Jordan Shearer reports: Rochester Public Schools has clarified what it believes opened the door to the large-scale cyberattack that crippled the district’s operations this spring. Superintendent Kent Pekel spoke about the issue on Wednesday, Aug. 23, while giving a presentation about the district’s upcoming technology referendum in November. “We weren’t negligent,” Pekel said. “But clearly one of…
University of Minnesota investigating potential data breach
Dana Thiede reports: The University of Minnesota confirms that it has contacted law enforcement and is investigating a claimed data breach that officials became aware of just a month ago. U of M spokesman Jake Ricker released a statement to KARE 11 saying on July 21 school administrators became aware that an “unauthorized party” claimed…
Bunker Hill Community College discloses May ransomware attack
From the college’s press release of August 18: Bunker Hill Community College (“BHCC”) confirmed today that the college experienced a data incident in May 2023 and will issue notices to affected individuals and relevant state and federal agencies about the incident. On May 23, 2023, BHCC detected irregular activity on certain BHCC systems that was consistent with a…
Listing for sale of U.S. Education Department data may not be what you expect
Yesterday, a listing appeared on a popular hacking forum offering data for sale that were reported to be from the US Department of Education (Ed.gov). According to the listing, the leaked information includes: “ID, UserID, UserName, MobileNumber, LevelID, ConsumerID, Type, FeedBack, SubjectID, Subject, Replied, Token, Completed, Date, Updated, Deleted, and Origin” DataBreaches contacted the…