PowerSchool paid a hacker’s ransom, but now schools say they are being extorted

Months after the hacked education software maker PowerSchool paid a hacker’s ransom to delete the company’s banks of stolen student data, at least one school district says it is now being extorted by someone who said the data was not destroyed. PowerSchool, which provides its K-12 software to thousands of schools to support 60 million students across North America, was hacked in December 2024 using a single stolen credential, which allowed a hacker broad access to PowerSchool’s stores of personally identifiable student and teacher data, including Social Security numbers and health data. The company said at the time that it had paid the hacker a ransom to allegedly delete the stolen data, but it has repeatedly refused to disclose the sum it paid. Now, Toronto’s district school board, which serves around 240,000 students each year, said in a statement that earlier this week it had “received a communication from a threat actor demanding a ransom using data from the previously reported ... Read full article.