I missed this one when it was first published two weeks ago, but apart from the privacy issues involving cyberstalking, it involves a hack of a school district’s information system and a class action lawsuit against the software firm. Kristen Taketa reported:
Haley Dinsmore was 12 when a classmate at Earl Warren Middle School asked her out. She didn’t know the boy, had never talked to him and felt she was too young to be dating anybody, so she politely declined.
In the following weeks, the boy retaliated by taking over her Instagram account, hacking into her family’s computer, and sending death threats, according to a lawsuit Dinsmore and her parents filed last November.
Later, when Dinsmore and the boy were in high school, the boy — who the lawsuit identifies as John Roe because he was a minor — hacked into that school’s student information system and lowered her grades from A’s to B’s, the lawsuit alleges.
Days later, their school district, San Dieguito Union High, filed a police report and Roe was arrested. Months later, a data breach in San Dieguito became the subject of a class-action lawsuit.
There are a lot of issues raised by this incident, but of note, the district wound up suing Aeries Software for alleged failure to properly secure the district’s information system.
According to a court filing, Aeries said that 166 school district databases were exposed to unauthorized access by an individual beginning in November 2019, but the company did not tell school districts about the breach until April 2020.
Read more on Encinitas Advocate. A settlement hearing in the Aeries class action litigation is scheduled for this month.