Breach exposed Dallas student, parent, teacher personal data

DALLAS (AP) – A data breach in the Dallas public school system earlier this month exposed students, parents, teachers and staff members’ personal information from 2010, system officials announced Thursday.

In statements posted on its website Thursday, the Dallas Independent School District said it learned of the violation on Aug. 8. Since then, the district has said it investigated and worked to contain the revelation before it was released.

According to the website, an unauthorized third party downloaded the data and cached it on an encrypted cloud storage space. Social security numbers, dates of birth, contact information, and grades were among the data disclosed.

The district said it had received no reports of fraud or identity theft due to the data breach. The plan was to open a hotline on Friday to answer questions from those affected and to help them set up credit monitoring.

The district is the second largest in Texas and is just behind the Houston Independent School District. The Dallas District employs 22,222 people and has 153,861 students enrolled in 230 schools, according to its website.

The breach was the most recent information technology failure reported by a government agency in Dallas. Dallas County attorneys recently learned that a city information technician accidentally deleted 22 terabytes of crime data.

Technicians have recovered 14 terabytes. Initially, the officials were left with about 7.5 terabytes, which were probably lost forever. However, an audit found that another 15 terabytes of police data were missing.

According to a statement from the police department, the lost data included pictures, videos, audio, case notes and other information collected from police officers and detectives. A city IT staff migrated the files, which had not been accessed in the past six to 18 months, from a cloud-based online archive to a server in the city’s data center. The city eventually fired the employee.

At least one murder trial has been postponed indefinitely and the suspect has been released on bail for lost data.

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