Students and teacher data in 60 Georgia school districts, including Buford City Schools and Dawson County, are at risk after PowerSchool, the country’s biggest education software provider in the country, was hacked. Nationwide, 6,500 school districts are affected.
The company says the hack is believed to have compromised data including names and addresses, social security numbers, and some medical and education information.
In all, more than 230,000 students in Georgia are believed affected.
The Buford school system says it has told parents and teachers that PowerSchool will be offering free identity protection services and complimentary credit monitoring services for all students and educators whose information was taken.
Roman Gaddis, Chief Technology & Information Officer for Dawson County Schools, says the hacking occurred in December after a set of credentials for accessing some of PowerSchool’s systems was compromised.
“This allowed unauthorized access to data stored in PowerSchool’s global Student Information System,” Gaddis wrote on the school system’s website, adding that according to experts, none of the data have been made public. And he emphasized “the incident was limited to PowerSchool’s internal systems, and the security of our school system’s network was not disturbed.”