A Massachusetts scholar has agreed to plead responsible to federal costs referring to hacking and extorting one of many largest U.S. schooling tech corporations, prosecutors confirmed Tuesday.
Matthew D. Lane, 19, is accused of utilizing stolen login credentials to entry the community of an unnamed software program firm, which serves colleges throughout North America and elsewhere, to steal the private data of greater than 60 million college students and 10 million lecturers.
The stolen private data included names, addresses, telephone numbers, Social Safety numbers, and medical data and faculty grades. In some circumstances, the hackers stole many years of historic scholar information.
Whereas the corporate was not named, federal prosecutors described particular particulars matching the info breach at schooling software program maker PowerSchool, which revealed in January that it had been hacked way back to September 2024. The breach affected colleges situated largely throughout the US and Canada, which use the PowerSchool software program to handle scholar grades, attendance, and different private and well being data.
Prosecutors say Lane labored with an unnamed co-conspirator who lived in Illinois to extort the schooling software program maker for about $2.85 million in cryptocurrency, in accordance with the felony grievance.
PowerSchool confirmed to TechCrunch in January that it had paid the hackers to delete the stolen information, however refused to say how a lot it paid. Earlier this month, a number of college districts mentioned that they’d since confronted extortion makes an attempt from somebody saying that the stolen scholar information had not been destroyed. PowerSchool mentioned the extortion makes an attempt weren’t associated to a brand new incident, because the “samples of information match the info beforehand stolen in December.”
NBC Information was first to report on Lane’s plea settlement.
PowerSchool spokesperson Beth Keebler mentioned the corporate was conscious of the submitting, and deferred remark to the U.S. Lawyer’s Workplace for Massachusetts, which didn’t reply to an e mail from TechCrunch. When requested, Keebler didn’t dispute the ransom quantity as famous by the prosecutors.
Lane can be accused of hacking and extorting one other firm, which prosecutors mentioned was a U.S. telecoms supplier. Prosecutors didn’t identify the corporate within the plea settlement.
Lane’s lawyer Sean Smith didn’t reply to a request for remark.
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