TechCrunch
On January 7, at 11:10 p.m. in Dubai, Romy Backus received an email from education technology giant PowerSchool notifying her that the school she works at was one of the victims of a data breach that the company discovered on December 28. PowerSchool said hackers had accessed a cloud system that housed a trove of students' and teachers' private information, including Social Security numbers, medical information, grades, and other personal data from schools all over the world. Given that PowerSchool bills itself as the largest provider of cloud-based education software for K-12 schools — some 18,000 schools and more than 60 million students — in North America, the impact could be “massive,” as one tech worker at an affected school told TechCrunch.