Education software maker Pearson says data breach affected thousands of accounts in the U.S.

Pearson, the London-based educational software maker, said today that thousands of school and university accounts, mostly in the United States, were affected by a data breach. The company added that it has notified affected users already and that the vulnerability has been fixed.

The Wall Street Journal reports that the data breach happened in November 2018 and Pearson was notified by the Federal Bureau of Investigation in March. The perpetrator is still unknown.

According to Pearson, unauthorized access was gained to 13,000 school and university accounts on AIMSweb, the company’s student monitoring and assessment platform. The data exposed included first and last names and, in some cases, date of birth and email addresses. Each account could potentially include information about thousands of students.

Pearson added that it has no evidence that any of the exposed information was misused. It will offer free credit monitoring services to affected users as a “precautionary measure.”

News of Pearson’s data breach comes the same week that Capital One disclosed a massive cyber attack that exposed sensitive information for about 100 million people in the U.S. and 6 million in Canada.



from TechCrunch https://ift.tt/332qCGl

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Microsoft says it has no plans to add more backward compatible titles for Xbox One, but says Project Scarlett will run games from all four Xbox generations (Tom Warren/The Verge)

Internal docs: Facebook employees created a test account in 2019 and within days, it was recommended extreme and conspiratorial content, including QAnon Groups (Brandy Zadrozny/NBC News)

Local officials, educators, and advocacy groups are frustrated by refusal of ISPs to provide data on how many customers they signed up via low income programs (Cyrus Farivar/NBC News)