Cyber ·
California alerts public school students about data stolen in breach at vendor ETS
The California Department of Education reported that the assessment provider ETS suffered a data breach lasting months and published notices to students in the state public school system.
The California Department of Education (CDE) reported that Educational Testing Service (ETS), an assessment service provider, suffered a data breach that lasted for months. According to the news item from The Record feed, the CDE published several notices last week to alert students in the state about the incident. The available source text does not detail the number of people affected, the volume of data taken, or the exact start and end dates of the breach, so these points should not be assumed.
The case illustrates a recurring risk: student data is often handled by third-party vendors, and a failure in that link can reach people who never contracted the service directly. For education and technology managers, it is worth reviewing which vendors receive personal data, requiring contractual deadlines for incident notification, and keeping a record of who processed each dataset.
To consult the source, find in The Record feed the article with the title given in this entry and compare it with the official CDE notices, which are the primary reference for the case.