Toronto School District Data Breach: 40 Years of Student Data Stolen

Data Breach at Toronto District School Board Potentially Impacts Decades of Student Records

The Toronto District School Board (TDSB), Canada’s largest school board, has announced a potential compromise of student data stemming from the recent PowerSchool breach.

According to a notice distributed to parents, the incident may have exposed information relating to students who were enrolled within the district spanning a period of nearly four decades.

Scope of the Data Breach

The TDSB stated that the breach potentially affected all students registered between September 1985 and December 2024. This extensive timeframe reflects the board’s practice of retaining historical student records.

Approximately 240,000 students are served by the school board annually, and historical data was maintained to facilitate responses to requests for former student transcripts and records.

Types of Information Compromised

The data potentially accessed by hackers includes core student identifiers such as names, addresses, dates of birth, and phone numbers.

Furthermore, data from 2017 onwards, also impacted by the breach, encompassed contact details for parents and guardians associated with student accounts.

PowerSchool’s Response and Data Deletion Claims

The TDSB reports that PowerSchool has communicated that the alleged perpetrators of the breach have provided confirmation of data deletion.

However, PowerSchool has yet to publicly disclose the specifics of the confirmation received from the hackers regarding the removal of the stolen data.

The board continues to investigate the incident and work with PowerSchool to ensure the security of student information.