{"id":244396,"date":"2026-05-12T09:49:00","date_gmt":"2026-05-12T13:49:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/2026\/05\/12\/powerschool-hack-was-a-significant-breach-says-n-l-privacy-commissioner\/"},"modified":"2026-05-12T10:35:16","modified_gmt":"2026-05-12T14:35:16","slug":"powerschool-hack-was-a-significant-breach-says-n-l-privacy-commissioner","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/2026\/05\/12\/powerschool-hack-was-a-significant-breach-says-n-l-privacy-commissioner\/","title":{"rendered":"PowerSchool hack was a \u2018significant breach,\u2019 says N.L. privacy commissioner"},"content":{"rendered":"

PowerSchool hack was a \u2018significant breach,\u2019 says N.L. privacy commissioner<\/a><\/p>\n

https:\/\/ca.news.yahoo.com\/powerschool-hack-significant-breach-says-134909356.html<\/a><\/p>\n

Publish Date: 2026-05-12 09:49:00<\/a><\/p>\n

Source Domain: ca.news.yahoo.com<\/a><\/p>\n

The Newfoundland and Labrador department of education did not have the proper tools in place to monitor the personal information stored by PowerSchool \u2014 which led to a massive privacy breach in which anyone who was a student or had a child in school from 1995 and onward had their personal information stolen.<\/p>\n

The information of teachers, dating back to 2010, was also vulnerable to hackers.<\/p>\n

In Jan. 2025 the provincial education department announced it was notified in late December hackers accessed PowerSchool, data management software used in the province’s K-to-12 school system.<\/p>\n

The privacy breach extends beyond Newfoundland and Labrador, as the PowerSchool platform is used in many jurisdictions across North America.<\/p>\n

\u201cThis was a significant breach that affected hundreds of thousands of people across the province, many of them children,\u201d said Information and Privacy Commissioner Kerry Hatfield in a media release issued Tuesday.<\/p>\n

In total, the MCP numbers of 244,917 from student records were accessed, from both current and former students.<\/p>\n

However, those numbers should not have been collected in the first place, according to the privacy commissioner\u2019s report.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe Department\u2019s collection and retention of student MCP numbers was not authorized under the\u00a0 [Access to Information and Protection of Privacy] Act,\u201d states the overview of the report.<\/p>\n

\u201cAs a result, the Report recommends that the Department immediately cease collecting this information and permanently remove existing MCP numbers from student records.\u201d<\/p>\n

In addition, Hatfield\u2019s report recommends the department of education directly notify a small group of current students who were identified as potentially having Social Insurance Number (SIN) information affected in the breach.<\/p>\n

The report states the department took \u201creasonable steps in its response to the breach,\u201d but noted there are areas for improvement.<\/p>\n

The report also cited PowerSchool for “its failure to meet [its] commitments in practice.”<\/p>\n

\n

Source<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

PowerSchool hack was a \u2018significant breach,\u2019 says N.L. privacy commissioner https:\/\/ca.news.yahoo.com\/powerschool-hack-significant-breach-says-134909356.html Publish Date: 2026-05-12 09:49:00…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":244397,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"fifu_image_url":"https:\/\/s.yimg.com\/os\/en\/cbc.ca\/17278917e69a4a01935494c42117144e","fifu_image_alt":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[16],"tags":[30],"class_list":["post-244396","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-privacy","tag-breach"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/244396"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=244396"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/244396\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":244398,"href":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/244396\/revisions\/244398"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/244397"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=244396"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=244396"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=244396"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}