A Massachusetts College student agreed to declare himself guilty of hacking the cloud -based education software provider, Powers School and stealing data related to millions of American students and teachers that the computer pirates used to extort the company and school districts to pay the bailouts.
Matthew Lane, 19, held a guilt agreement on Tuesday to resolve the positions presented in the Federal Court in Worcester, Massachusetts, related to the pirate of two companies, which were then extorted by rescue.
The judicial documents did not identify the companies affected by their name, but a person familiar with the matter confirmed that Powerschool was one of the victims.
The charges marked the first time that the authorities had identified who was responsible for a data violation in Powerschool that seemed to expose the data of dozens of millions of children. Powerschool software is used by more than 18,000 schools to support more than 60 million students.
In Canada, the School Boards in Ontario, Saskatchewan, Alberta, Terranova and Labrador, Nueva Scotia, Prince Eduardo, Manitoba Island and the Northwest territories were among those affected by mass rape.
‘A notch in its piracy belt’
Lane is a student at Assuming University in Worcester. Prosecutor Leah Foley in a statement said that her actions “infused fear in parents that their children’s information had leaked in the hands of criminals, everything to put a little in their piracy belt.”
Lane’s lawyer did not respond to comments requests.
Powerschool, based in Folsom, California, revealed the rape in January. He said he learned on December 28, 2024 and decided to pay a ransom to prevent the data from making public.
Powerschool said earlier this month that multiple school districts have also received extortion demands related to the same data.
According to prosecutors, Lane used the credentials of a Powerschool contractor in September to obtain access to her network and obtain data from students and teachers.
In December, he transferred data to students and teachers to a computer server that leased from a cloud storage supplier in Ukraine, according to prosecutors.
Days later, Powerschool received a rescue demand that threatened to filter the names, addresses, social security numbers and other confidential data that belong to more than 60 million students and 10 million teachers unless he paid $ 2.85 million in prosecutors worth the United States, according to prosecutors.
They said that before hacking Powerschool, Lane and others conspired to extort a telecommunications company not identified to pay an American ransom of $ 200,000 to avoid the dissemination of stolen data from their network.
He agreed to declare himself guilty of participating in cyber extortion and aggravated identity theft and accessing protected computers without authorization. He faces at least two years in prison.
