A widespread security breach compromising data held by the PowerSchool Student Information System has possibly impacted the Wilton Public Schools, district officials said Thursday (Jan. 9).
Several Connecticut school districts as well as many others nationally and internationally have also been affected.
According to a statement from PowerSchool, the company discovered a security breach on Dec. 28 involving “unauthorized access to certain PowerSchool SIS information through one of our community-focused customer portals, PowerSource.”
Wilton Public Schools Superintendent Kevin Smith confirmed to GOOD Morning Wilton that Wilton may be one of the school districts involved. Smith said that in a call with PowerSchool on Wednesday, he was told by the company that PowerSchool had been a target of a cyberattack but “worked with a couple of data security experts to negotiate with the individual who hacked them and received assurances that the compromised data was deleted and not shared.”
Smith said that Wilton school officials don’t have district-specific information yet, but that PowerSchool will provide more details “in the next week.”
PowerSchool is used by the district to maintain student and staff records that, according to a message Smith sent to parents on Thursday morning, are “hosted off-site.”
Smith said he does not yet know if the data of any district staff or families was part of the security breach. In his message to parents, he also wrote that both the PowerSchool company and the district’s informational technology provider are continuing to investigate the extent of the breach, but that PowerSchool “do[es] not anticipate the [compromised] data being shared or made public.”
Smith told GMW that PowerSchool will be taking steps to “monitor the dark web to verify” that data has not been released and that it “plan[s] to offer credit and other monitoring to any individual who may have been impacted.”
The full text of Smith’s message is below:
Greetings,
On January 7, 2025 Wilton Public Schools was informed that some information may have been compromised in a data breach of the PowerSchool Student Information System. The system contains student and staff records and is hosted off site.
This is part of a wide-spread issue that affects districts throughout the country. We have been informed by PowerSchool that the compromised data has been deleted and that no additional copies exist. They do not anticipate the data being shared or made public, and they have closed the exploit that made the breach possible.
PowerSchool is actively investigating the causes and extent of the breach. We take the privacy and security of our students, families, and staff very seriously and will also continue to monitor the situation. We do not yet have specific information about impacted staff and families, but we will share updates and additional information as we learn more. Our IT services provider adds additional security to our data systems and will provide support throughout the investigation as well.Sincerely,
Kevin J. Smith, Ph.D.
Superintendent of Schools