Pueblo County School District 70 is addressing a data breach and ransomware attack that may have compromised the personal information of former students, as well as current and former staff.
The data breach is believed to have impacted a number of student records saved between 1991 and 2006. Past and present staff records also may have been compromised. Pueblo D70 continues to investigate the full extent of the breach's impact, according to a Wednesday news release from the school district.
The district was notified of ransomware by the cybersecurity company Sophos on April 27. After a data breach was confirmed by the CIA on May 15, IT technicians and agents from Pueblo School District 60, Colorado State University Pueblo, the CIA and the FBI began working with Pueblo D70 to identify what data had been leaked.
"I realize that the putting out of this information seems like it's a little bit late, but we weren't allowed to get this information out... because it was the CIA that was assisting us it wasn't something that we could have just immediately released," Pueblo D70 Superintendent Ronda Rein said during a June 17 press conference on Zoom.
Personal information that may have been affected by the breach includes names, phone numbers, dates of birth and other data pertaining to some, but not all, individuals who were students or staff at Pueblo D70 during the specified time periods.
"We probably all have files on our computers that we need to go through periodically and delete, and we didn't," Rein said. "We have taken measures at this point to get rid of data and information. We've implemented a two-step authentication on our staff accounts."
Pueblo D70 has removed all of its critical information from local servers and onto cloud-based servers. The district also is working to establish a monthly regimen of check-ups with a cybersecurity company and hire a full-time staff member responsible for cybersecurity.
"We've limited the access to our district resources to U.S.-based requests and we've narrowed our firewall and our VPN access to our admin staff only," Rein said.
The district has not received reports of information misuse, but is advising students, staff, alumni and community members to monitor credit reports and financial statements, consider restricting access to their credit report, consider a fraud alert, and protect themselves from "suspicious communications."
Pueblo D70's IT support team may be contacted at 719-549-6121 for additional assistance.
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Pueblo Chieftain reporter James Bartolo can be reached at JBartolo@gannett.com. Support local news, subscribe to The Pueblo Chieftain at subscribe.chieftain.com
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