1M students' personal info compromised in Illuminate data breach

565 schools in New York, including more than 1 million students, were among those whose private student data was impacted during a hacker attack on Illuminate Education’s systems.

The list of New York schools impacted by the data breach was sent to THE Journal in response to a Freedom of Information request.

Officials said the list came from Illuminate. New York state has just over 4,400 schools in all, according to the New York State Education Department' (NYSED) website.

Under New York law, each local education agency impacted by a breach must file a detailed report with NYSED within a week confirming the number of current and former students and/or staff whose data was affected. That process is still ongoing.

Also this week, another district in Colorado has announced it, too, was impacted by the Illuminate data breach. Douglas County School District, Colorado’s third largest with 64,000 students, sent a note to parents this week.

The district said the company, Illuminate Education, provides apps and tech support to schools across the country, including the Douglas County School District. An unauthorized third party’ gained access to a dataset containing student information.

Another large-scale data leak occurred earlier. On May 2, the Anonymous hacker group released 82 GB worth of emails belonging to the Nauru Police Force.