Brant Catholic school board among those across Canada affected by data breach
The board is working to determine what 'exactly may have been shared'
Information related to students and staff with the Brant Haldimand Norfolk Catholic District School Board (BHNCDSB) was potentially accessed in a data breach last month, the board has confirmed.
The breach involved the California-based management system PowerSchool, which is used in schools to store a range of student and staff information.
The board said in a statement late last week PowerSchool is working with it to determine "exactly what may have been shared," and expects to receive a report from a cyber security firm by Jan. 17.
After that, "BHNCDSB will have a clear picture of the extent of our involvement in the breach," the statement said.
The Niagara Catholic District School Board, the Grand Erie school board and the Halton District School Board all said they are clients or use PowerSchool services, but confirmed to CBC they have not been impacted by the data breach.
The Hamilton-Wentworth Catholic District School Board also confirmed it has not been impacted.
CBC also reached out to the Hamilton public board, Halton Catholic board and Niagara public board but they did not respond before publication.
A spokesperson for PowerSchool said in a statement it became aware of "a potential cybersecurity incident" on Dec. 28 that involved unauthorized access to information on its Student Information System.
"As soon as we learned of the incident, we immediately engaged our cybersecurity response protocols and mobilized a cross-functional response team, including senior leadership and third-party cybersecurity experts," read the statement.
There were no operational disruptions or other services affected, according to the PowerSchool statement.
According to the Brant Catholic board's Jan. 9 statement, PowerSchool "put safeguards in place to mitigate the breach" and took steps to prevent the use and publication of the data.
Schools all over Canada affected
The company also said it would not share the specific number of districts and schools involved due to the ongoing investigation.
PowerSchool has over 16,000 customers in more than 90 countries. Several school boards in Canada have been affected by the data breach.
There were at least three school boards impacted by the breach in the Toronto area, including Canada's largest public school board, the Toronto District School Board. The London Catholic school board was also impacted.
In Manitoba, 80 per cent of school divisions were affected by the data breach.
Colin Campbell, superintendent of the Seine River School Division in Manitoba, said an investigation showed students' names, date of birth, home phone numbers, gender and sibling information may have been exported during the cyber incident.
Prairie Spirit School Division in Saskatchewan was also affected. The division's superintendent Cheryl Mangin said "a fee was paid by PowerSchool SIS to delete the data and keep it from being released."
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
With files from Edzi'u Loverin