Christopher Brown reports: PowerSchool Holdings Inc. is facing three federal lawsuits alleging the education software provider negligently failed to protect the personal information of students, parents, and teachers that was exposed in a December data breach. Sheilah Buack-Shelton, Tyler Baker, and Kimberly Kinney alleged in separate complaints that PowerSchool breached its duties under common law,…
Category: Of Note
PowerSchool Incident: A few resources for teachers, parents, and former students (2)
DataBreaches is trying to keep up with updates from PowerSchool, but from the outset, DataBreaches has recommended districts, parents, and teachers assume the worst — i.e., assume that all of the data really weren’t deleted permanently. On the premise of better safe than sorry, and reminding people that PowerSchool’s attorney is not YOUR attorney, here…
Hackers Claim To Have Compromised Data Broker Used By U.S. Government To Dodge Warrants
Over on TechDirt, Karl Bode writes: Gravy Analytics, the parent company of Venntel, is like many dodgy data brokers. The company gleans vast troves of sensitive U.S. behavior and location cellphone data, then generally sells access to that data to a long line of folks. Including the U.S. government, which has increasingly turned to buying…
HHS Office for Civil Rights Settles HIPAA Security Rule Investigation with USR Holdings, LLC Concerning the Deletion of Electronic Protected Health Information
Note: In 2019, when USR Holdings disclosed this breach to affected patients, they did not mention that ePHI had been deleted. So in 2025, we are first learning of this part of the breach? The following is HHS OCR’s press release today. Settlement resolves multiple Security Rule failures Today, the U.S. Department of Health and…
PowerSchool discloses breach affecting hosted and self-hosted school k-12 districts (2)
Yesterday, PowerSchool disclosed that on December 28, it had become aware of a data breach that affected some, but not all, of its PowerSchool clients. PowerSchool Student Information System (SIS) is used by school districts worldwide to help schools manage student educational records including grades, attendance, and enrollment. Emails were sent to all PowerSchool clients…
HHS Office for Civil Rights Settles 8th Ransomware Investigation with Elgon Information Systems
Today, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), Office for Civil Rights (OCR) announced an $80,000 settlement with Elgon Information Systems (Elgon), a Massachusetts company that provides electronic medical record and billing support services to covered entities, under the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act of 1996 (HIPAA) Security Rule. OCR enforces the HIPAA Privacy,…