Potential impacts of Alabama State Department of Education being hacked

ALABAMA ( WHNT ) — The hacking of the Alabama State Department of Education’s system could mean your student’s data is now in the hands of criminals, but not just students, it also includes teachers and faculty.

State Superintendent Eric Mackey says the Alabama State Department of Education believes data was stolen during a cyber attack back in June, but officials are working to determine what data was stolen and who might be impacted.

Jay Town, the vice president of Gray Analytics, a cybersecurity company, says state, local and city agencies are always a target for hackers due to how much information they collect.

“There’s a lot of data on a lot of people,” Town said. “Think about all the forms all the information that goes on the forms when you enroll a child in a public school. It’s not just the child’s name but its the address, it’s cell phone numbers, and it’s emergency contacts.”

Town says hackers always find value in compromised information.

For parents and educators wondering how this could effect them and their students, the stolen data could be personally identifiable, which would enable criminals to open bank accounts or credit accounts in their name.

“That information could wind up in the hands of really bad people often times it’s found on the dark web, it’s sold and it’s transferred,” Towns said. “Nefarious bad actors whether it’s a foreign country or a fat kid on the couch, they know that there’s money in exfiltrating data.”

Mackey says the good news is the hack was caught and interrupted before more damage could be done in what’s now an ongoing federal investigation. He’s urging people who may have been involved to remain aware.

“To all parents and all local and state education employees out there, they should monitor their credit they should assume that there’s a possibility that some of their data was compromised,” Mackey said.

If your involved with the state department of education, officials recommend placing a fraud alert on your credit file and to contact major credit bureaus for a credit report. You may also want to consider freezing your credit.

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“It’s 2024 this isn’t new,” Towns said. “Cyber security, ransom ware attacks, cyber attacks, these aren’t new, these aren’t just happening this has been happening steadily for the last 15 years.”

The department of education says while all of its services have been restored and are now back up and running, its website will be down for several hours Wednesday night as they work to update their system to protect their data.

Once work on the website is completed, any future updates pertaining to the data breach can be found at AlabamaArchives.org/databreach. You can also send emails with concerns to databreach@alsde.edu.

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