Los Angeles Unified Faculty District (LAUSD) officers are investigating a menace actor’s claims that they are promoting stolen databases containing information belonging to tens of millions of scholars and hundreds of lecturers.
LAUSD is the second largest public college district in the USA, with over 25,900 lecturers, roughly 48,700 different workers, and greater than 563,000 college students enrolled through the 2023-2024 college 12 months.
The menace actor promoting the allegedly stolen information for $1,000 says the CSV recordsdata put up on the market on a hacking discussion board include over 11GB of knowledge, together with over 26 million information with scholar data, greater than 24,000 instructor information, and round 500 containing workers data.
Additionally they shared two information samples containing roughly 1,000 scholar information with Social Safety Numbers (SSNs), addresses, father or mother addresses, electronic mail addresses, contact data, and dates of delivery as proof that the data was respectable.
Researchers who analyzed these samples informed BleepingComputer that the bought information seems respectable however could possibly be previous, because the dataset doesn’t embrace latest dates. Nonetheless, the menace actor solely shared a small pattern of the allegedly stolen information, so there could also be new data that has but to be shared.
BleepingComputer contacted LAUSD earlier in the present day to substantiate the menace actor’s claims and was informed that the general public college district is now investigating them.
“We’re wanting into this and can get again to you if we now have additional data to share,” LAUSD Public Info Officer Britt Vaughan informed BleepingComputer.
Vice Society ransomware assault
LAUSD was additionally hit by a ransomware assault in September 2022, over the Labor Day weekend. The Vice Society gang claimed the breach, saying in addition they stole 500GB of recordsdata earlier than encrypting the district’s methods.
On the day LAUSD disclosed the incident, the FBI, CISA, and MS-ISAC additionally issued a joint advisory warning that Vice Society was disproportionately concentrating on training organizations.
After the assault, LAUSD requested all workers (together with lecturers, help workers, and directors) and college students to reset their @LAUSD.web account credentials in individual at a district web site and expedited the rollout of multi-factor authentication.
Virtually one month after the assault, Vice Society printed the stolen LAUSD information on their darkish internet leak web site, together with what a regulation enforcement supply described as “confidential psychological assessments of scholars, contract and authorized paperwork, enterprise information, and quite a few database entries.”
The leak got here after the district introduced that it might not pay the ransom demanded by the ransomware gang as a result of it would not assure the total restoration of knowledge and “public {dollars} are higher spent on our college students.”
It’s unclear at the moment if the info at the moment being bought on the hacking discussion board is linked to the info stolen by Vice Society.
