Toledo Public Schools vows support for staff affected by data breach

TOLEDO, Ohio (WTVG) - Representatives for Toledo Public Schools say they’re planning to do what they can to assist those whose personal information was posted online following a massive breach of personal data at the District. This is the first time the District has addressed the breach in-depth, choosing to release only a short statement on Friday.

During an interview with 13abc, Deputy Superintendent Jim Gant said that administrators would be reaching out to faculty and staff who have been affected to let them know what the next steps are. In an e-mail sent to faculty and staff on Monday afternoon, district leaders urged all employees to monitor their accounts and credit reports for fraud or suspicious activity.

Representatives for the district say they will be providing credit monitoring services to those affected sometime soon but did not give a clear date on when that would be available.

TPS district leaders address data breach
Posted by 13abc on Monday, October 19, 2020

The district did say that so far there have been no confirmed reports of misuse of the stolen data, and representatives reaffirmed their claim that they were unaware that any data had been stolen until members of the media, including 13abc, reached out on Friday. The breach was first reported on by DataBreaches.net on September 14, when the hackers claiming responsibility first made that claim online. The information was not dumped until last week, and 13abc became aware of that dump of information late on Thursday.

According to Gant, the district was not aware of any communication from the hackers and no ransom was either demanded or paid.

The 13abc I-Team on Friday confirmed that the information posted online, amounting to nearly 9GB of data, was at least in part made of up the personal information of faculty, staff, and students. The accuracy of that data was confirmed by several staff members whose information was found in the files. The full extent of the data breach is still unclear, including an exact date range of those records.

13abc will continue to follow this story as it develops.