Notice: Power School Data Breach, January 2025
TO: River Bend CUSD 2 Families, Staff and Students,
SUBJECT: Power School Data Breach
Dear families and educators of the River Bend community,
PowerSchool – a cloud-based software vendor used by River Bend – recently experienced a cybersecurity incident involving unauthorized access to certain information in the PowerSchool Student Information System (SIS).
On Tuesday, January 7, 2025, PowerSchool informed us that they experienced a cybersecurity incident involving unauthorized access to certain PowerSchool SIS customer data, which impacted many school districts both domestically and internationally, as Power School serves over 60 million students and has more than 18,000 customers. This data breach was an attack on PowerSchool and was not a cyberattack directed at River Bend. While the threat actors were not directly attacking our district and did not directly access any of River Bend’s systems, unfortunately, Power School has confirmed that some of the information extracted through PowerSchool belongs to some of River Bend’s families and educators.
We are reaching out to share information and next steps that we recently received directly from PowerSchool:
Identity Protection and Credit Monitoring Services: PowerSchool has engaged Experian, a trusted credit reporting agency, to offer two years of complimentary identity protection services for all students and educators whose information from our PowerSchool SIS was involved. This offer will also include two years of complimentary credit monitoring services for all adult students and educators whose information was involved.
Notification to Individuals Involved: Starting in the next few weeks, in collaboration with Experian, PowerSchool will provide notice to students (or their parents / guardians if the student is under 18) and educators whose information was involved, as well as a phone number to answer any questions you may have about the incident. The notice will include the identity protection and credit monitoring services offer (as applicable).
As soon as PowerSchool learned of the incident, they engaged cybersecurity response protocols and mobilized senior leadership and third-party cybersecurity experts to conduct a forensic investigation of the scope of the incident and to monitor for signs of information misuse. PowerSchool is not aware of any identity theft attributable to this incident.
In the meantime, I encourage you to visit https://www.powerschool.com/security/sis-incident/ for up-to-date information on the cybersecurity incident. We care deeply about the welfare of our Power School families and will continue to do everything we can to support you. Thank you for the important role you play in our community and your shared commitment to putting our students first. We will continue to share more information from PowerSchool as it becomes available.
Sincerely,
Darryl Hogue, Supt. River Bend Schools