Photo illustration
FULLERTON — PowerSchool, a cloud-based software platform used by schools across the country, announced that they became aware of a data breach that affected some of its clients last month.
Unauthorized access to the company’s platforms began on Dec. 19 and ended on Dec. 28, according to published reports.
“We believe the unauthorized actor extracted two tables within the student information system database,” a PowerSchool spokesperson said. “These tables primarily include contact information with data elements such as name and address information for families and educators. For a certain subset of the customers, these tables may also include Social Security Number, other personally identifiable information, and limited medical and grade information.”
The company released a statement saying that they do not anticipate the data being shared or made public, and they believe it has been deleted without any further replication or dissemination.
PowerSchool announced they deactivated the compromised credential and restricted access to the affected portal.
“Lastly, we have conducted a full password reset and further tightened password and access control for all PowerSource customer support portal accounts,” the company said in a statement.
Fullerton schools use PowerSchool for attendance and grades.
“PowerSchool had their breach,” Fullerton Superintendent Dr. Jeff Anderson said. “They jumped in and took care of it. They do not anticipate any problems. I do not anticipate anything locally having an impact.”
PowerSchool is putting together an incident report with a full forensic analysis. The report should be released later this week.
“I am waiting to see what they come up with,” Anderson said. “They jumped in and took care of it. They did their job.”
Fullerton administrators performed an internal data analysis and discovered that 27 students spanning two grades had social security numbers that had been collected at registration and entered in PowerSchool. The data had been erased locally, and the parents of affected students are being contacted.
Twin River schools do not use PowerSchool.