Washoe County School District suffers data breach impacting 114,000 students

• The compromised information includes students’ names and dates of birth, alongside a limited number of staff names and email addresses.
• The incident impacted nearly 114,000 students who attended Washoe County Schools between 2001 and 2016.

Washoe County School District (WCSD) suffered a data breach incident, which impacted nearly 114,000 students who attended Washoe County Schools between 2001 and 2016.

What happened?

The school district said that the breach occurred after one of its contractors, Pearson fell victim to a security incident.

Pearson notified the WCSD on July 24, 2019, that it had experienced a data security incident involving an older version of the Pearson Clinical Assessment's program, AIMSweb that was accessed by an unauthorized third party.

What information was compromised?

The compromised information includes students’ names and dates of birth, alongside a limited number of staff names and email addresses.

“The type of information involved in this incident was extremely limited,” said Robert Sidford, Chief Information and Innovation Officer for WCSD.

What was the response?

• The school district is working with the contractor to ensure that WCSD student data in their possession has been appropriately secured.
• WCSD is notifying the impacted students and staff about the incident and is offering free credit monitoring services for all impacted individuals.

“While WCSD would like to individually reach out to every person impacted by this breach, the information is old and not specific enough for the District to identify exactly who has been impacted,” Alan Cunningham, Information Security Officer at WCSD said.

“Because the information in question was generated so long ago, many of these students are no longer in our schools. In addition, the type of information is so limited, it is difficult to identify any of the students impacted. However, we are issuing this notification out of an abundance of caution so families and individuals are aware of the potential release of this information,” Cunningham added.