The Federal Trade Commission took action against Illuminate Education on December 1, 2025, after the Wisconsin-based company suffered a massive data breach that exposed personal information of more than 10 million students. In late December 2021, a hacker used login credentials from a former employee who had left the company three and a half years earlier.
The breach exposed students’ email addresses, home addresses, dates of birth, student records, and health information. The company had promised schools it would protect student data “like it’s our own” and claimed to use industry best practices. But the FTC found Illuminate failed to implement basic security measures, including storing student data in plain text format until at least January 2022.
Read more…
Source: ConsumerAffairs News
Sign up for the Cyber Security Review Newsletter
The latest cyber security news and insights delivered right to your inbox
Related:
- AerCap confirms cybersecurity attack
January 23, 2024
Irish aircraft leasing giant AerCap is investigating a cybersecurity attack on its systems, but says that it suffered no financial loss as result of the hack. Claims surfaced online at the weekend that an organisation had hacked the Dublin-headquartered multinational’s systems and planned to leak data within days. AerCap confirmed that on January 17th it experienced ...
- “The mother of all breaches”: 26 billion records found online
January 23, 2024
Security researchers have discovered billions of exposed records online, calling it the “mother of all breaches”. However, the dataset doesn’t seem to be from one single data breach, but more a compilation of multiple breaches. These sets are often created by data enrichment companies. Data enrichment is the process of combining first party data from internal ...
- Subway reportedly hit by LockBit ransomware – but is it half-baked speculation?
January 23, 2024
Subway has allegedly suffered a data breach at the hands of none other than the notorious LockBit ransomware gang. According to a media report, the ransomware-as-a-service provider added the sandwich makers to its data leak site earlier this week after one of its affiliates made away with gigabytes of sensitive data. Read more… Source: MSN News
- Australia: Russian man Aleksandr Ermakov has been sanctioned over the Medibank data breach
January 23, 2024
The Australian government has used Magnitsky-style sanctions for the first time to punish Russian man Aleksandr Ermakov over what it says is his role in the 2022 Medibank Private data breach. Foreign Minister Penny Wong, Home Affairs Minister Clare O’Neil and Deputy Prime Minister Richard Marles made the announcement on Tuesday morning. But what exactly are ...
- VF Corp’s cyber incident causes data breach of 35.5 million consumers
January 19, 2024
Vans sneaker maker VF Corp said on Thursday the cyber incident that hit the company in December led to a breach of personal data of about 35.5 million consumers, and added that it does not expect a material impact to its financials. The unauthorized activity, detected on Dec. 13, disrupted global customer orders on its e-commerce ...
- Microsoft actions following attack by nation state actor Midnight Blizzard
January 19, 2024
The Microsoft security team detected a nation-state attack on our corporate systems on January 12, 2024, and immediately activated our response process to investigate, disrupt malicious activity, mitigate the attack, and deny the threat actor further access. Microsoft has identified the threat actor as Midnight Blizzard, the Russian state-sponsored actor also known as Nobelium. Beginning in ...