Breaches and incidents
California Department of Education (via contractor Educational Testing Service): student records of all public school pupils from three school years copied
Per The Record, hackers “copied student information through a secure file transfer protocol site this year from May 22 to September 18”.
- Disclosed
- Verification
- Confirmed by two or more outlets
What happened
- Per The Record, hackers “copied student information through a secure file transfer protocol site this year from May 22 to September 18”; ETS found the intrusion on 25 Sep and the state began notifying families on 16 Oct. The data covers “all children enrolled in public schools over the last three years”; LAist says the breach “exposed the information of 5.7 million students” (a 7 million figure attributed to Politico could not be loaded).
- Data per The Record and LAist: names, birth dates, addresses, statewide and local student IDs, demographic details, “Disability and Section 504 status, testing accommodations”, low-income or unhoused status and test results; LAist reports SSNs, driver’s licence numbers, financial and parent data were not included. Cause: an account on the SFTP site was used; ETS “initially disabled the account used to steal the information” (The Record). How the account was obtained is not stated in sources fetched.
- No attacker named; no group had claimed it per The Record.
- ETS took the SFTP site offline, built a new platform and offers two years of identity protection (deadline 19 Mar 2027 per LAist); CDE is “reviewing... ETS’s compliance with applicable data security and contractual requirements.”