The personal information of children, parents, teachers, and staff dating back to 2010 was exposed in a data breach at the Dallas public school system earlier this month, according to officials.
The Dallas Independent School District said it learned of the compromise on August 8 in remarks uploaded to its website on Thursday. The district claims it has been studying and working to contain the exposure since then before releasing it to the public.
According to the website, the data was obtained and temporarily stored on an encrypted cloud storage site by an unauthorised third party. The data disclosed included Social Security numbers, birth dates, contact information, and grades.
The district stated that no reports of fraud or identity theft had been received as a result of the data leak. It planned to launch a helpline on Friday to answer inquiries and assist those who were affected in setting up credit monitoring.
The district is Texas’s second-largest, trailing only the Houston Independent School District in size. According to its website, the Dallas district employs 22,222 people and has 153,861 students enrolled in 230 schools.
The incident was the latest in a string of information technology failures disclosed by a Dallas government agency. Prosecutors in Dallas County recently found that a city information worker accidentally destroyed 22 gigabytes of crime data.
Technicians were able to recover 14 gigabytes of data. Initially, this left officials with around 7.5 gigabytes of data that would be lost forever. However, an audit discovered that another 15 gigabytes of police data had gone missing.
Images, video, audio, case notes, and other information obtained by police officers and detectives were among the data destroyed, according to a police department statement. A city IT employee was moving files from an online, cloud-based archive to a server at the city’s data centre, which had not been accessed in six to 18 months. The employee was eventually sacked by the city.
Because to lost data, at least one murder trial has been postponed indefinitely, and the suspect has been released on bond.
