PowerSchool, a hacked educational software manufacturer, paid the hacker’s ransom to delete the company’s stolen student data banks by paying the hacker’s ransom, and one school district is being robbed by a person who said that the data was not destroyed.
PowerSchool, which provides K-12 software to thousands of schools to support 60 million students across North America, was hacked using a single stolen credentials in December 2024, and hackers were able to access the PowerSchool’s personal identification students and teacher data stores, including social security numbers and health data.
The company told the hacker at the time that he had paid a ransom to delete the stolen data, but repeatedly refused the amount he paid.
The Toronto District Office of Education, which serves about 240,000 students every year, said earlier this week, “We have been communicated by threaters who use the data of previously reported accidents to require ransom.”
Several schools in North America have received robbery notes according to local media, including the entire North Carolina.
PowerSchool confirmed that he had paid Ransom at the time and said, “I thought it was the best choice to prevent the data from being released.”
Some cyber security experts and law enforcement agencies have prevented the victim from paying the ransom because there is no guarantee that hackers will adhere to their words when deleting the stolen data. As proved by the past ransomware and robbery events, some gangs later found that they had later maintained a large amount of theft victim data, often to resume individuals with an attempt.
PowerSchool said in a statement shared with customers this week, “I recently found out that some PowerSchool SIS customers were threatened by using data in the December 2024 violation.”
Beth Keebler, a spokesman for PowerSchool, told TechCrunch, “I don’t think this incident is a new event because data samples match the previous stolen data in December.”
PowerSchool has not yet talked about the number of individuals affected by data violations. At the time of the violation, several school districts using PowerSchool said TechCrunch said that the “all” of historical students and teacher data were damaged.
In the case of Toronto School District, the stolen record is likely to go back to 2009 and affect millions of people.
