PowerSchool Notice of Data Breach Impacting Hansen School District 415

On January 8th we received word of a nation wide PowerSchool data breach. Hansen School District uses PowerSchool as our student information system, as do many other schools in the state of Idaho. This breach is the result of an unauthorized party gaining access the PowerSchool's support portals and sequentially gained access to PowerSchool Student Information Systems. This affects customers that are hosted and not hosted directly by PowerSchool.

What we have confirmed is that some of the PowerSchool SIS data that was breached did belong to Hansen School District's families and educators. We have been informed that the data breach was limited to tables containing teacher and student contact data. We have attached links to below to show the list of fields that are available in these tables. Please note that not all fields will have data in them. One primary field that we do not use is the SSN (Social Security Number) field for students or staff.

Protecting our students, teachers, and staff is something we take seriously. With PowerSchool's help, more information and resources (including credit monitoring or identity protection services if applicable) will be provided to you as it becomes available.

What we have done in the meantime is followed PowerSchool's guidance on how to disable the always on support connection. This will require that any future connections from PowerSchool support must first be authorized via communications with district IT staff. We have also implemented Geo IP filters to limit locations that can access our systems. PowerSchool has forced the updating of all their support credentials to prevent further unauthorized access to their support tools. PowerSchool has also moved the part of the tool allowing them to access customer systems behind their corporate VPN.

At this time we are continuing to work with PowerSchool to further investigate this breach. You can continue to check back here for more information.

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PowerSchool's Notice of Data Breach and Identity Monitoring

PowerSchool has posted its Notice of Data Breach For Individuals in the United States to share some important information regarding the recent cybersecurity incident involving personal information belonging to current or former students and teachers of schools  and districts like Hansen School District 415 that use or used software called PowerSchool Student Information System (SIS). https://www.powerschool.com/security/sis-incident/notice-of-united-states-data-breach/. The PowerSchool Notice contains important instructions regarding enrolling in two year of complimentary identity protection services through Experian.

May 12th 2025 Update

Dear families and educators of the Hansen community:

We are writing to inform you of a recent development related to the cybersecurity incident PowerSchool experienced in December 2024.

PowerSchool is aware that a threat actor has reached out to multiple school district customers in an attempt to extort them using data from the previously reported December 2024 incident. PowerSchool does not believe this is a new incident.

Please be assured that both PowerSchool and Hansen School District are taking this situation very seriously. PowerSchool has informed us they are working with cybersecurity experts to thoroughly assess this development and have reported it to law enforcement in both Canada and the United States.

As a reminder, following that incident PowerSchool also offered and made widely available credit monitoring and identity protection services for a period of two years to students and faculty at Hansen School District regardless of whether they were individually involved. We encourage all those who were offered these services to take advantage of them:

As was reported earlier this year, PowerSchool made the decision to pay a ransom because they believed it to be in the best interest of their customers and the students and communities they serve. As is always the case with these situations, there was a risk that the bad actors would not delete the data they stole, despite assurances and evidence that were provided PowerSchool.

We wanted to share this update as part of our ongoing commitment to transparency. We remain committed to working closely with PowerSchool and law enforcement to provide support in any way we can.

Sincerely,

Hansen School District 415

Important Links

PowerSchool Table Fields

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