Data Breach in Downingtown Area School District Has Everyone Scratching Their Heads

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Image via Jessica Griffin, Philadelphia Inquirer.

As Downingtown Area School District administrators are hard at work trying to determine who and how someone hacked their college resource website, the reasons behind the data breach remain uncertain amid conflicting reports, writes Maddie Hanna for The Philadelphia Inquirer.

On Oct. 11, administrators discovered that students had gained teacher-level access to Naviance, a college preparation website, which holds personal information on thousands of students.

Gary Mattei, Downingtown’s technology director, sent out a letter to families on Oct. 17 stating that the district is taking the attack very seriously.

“This is a crime against our district and, more importantly, a crime against you, our DASD student and parent community,” he wrote.

The stories started to circulate that the hack was done to get students’ home addresses to gain the upper hand in the game Assassin. This involves students eliminating others from the contest by shooting them with water guns.

However, anonymous students who claimed some knowledge of the incident denied online that Assassin was the reason for the breach. They said it was done to use the data to send automated “happy birthday” messages to students and create a list of top-performing peers.

Read more about the Downingtown Area School District in The Philadelphia Inquirer here.

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