NEW YORK — Personal data for roughly 820,000 current and former New York City public school students was compromised in the hack of a widely used online grading and attendance system earlier this year, city Education Department officials said Friday, revealing what could be the largest-ever breach of K-12 student data in the United States.
Furious city Education Department officials are accusing Illuminate Education, the California-based company behind the popular Skedula and PupilPath platforms, of misrepresenting its cybersecurity measures by certifying that it encrypts all student data when in fact the company left some of it unencrypted.
The breach prompted a weekslong shutdown of grading and attendance systems in January, causing chaos at city schools. The hackers gained access to a database with the names, birthdays, ethnicities, home languages and student ID numbers of current and former public school students going back to the 2016-17 school year, Illuminate told the Education Department. Illuminate did not specify what categories of information were compromised for each of the 820,000 affected students.
