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:
- Equifax, regulators sign $700m deal to settle data breach lawsuits
July 22, 2019
Equifax signed a settlement today to lay to rest lawsuits brought forward by the US Federal Trade Commission (FTC), state attorneys, and a class-action case relating to the firm’s 2017 data breach. The security incident was caused by a failure to resolve a known security flaw in Apache Struts, despite a patch being made available two ...
- Massive 7.5TB breach reveals secret Russian IT projects
July 22, 2019
Hackers breached the server of a major contractor working on behalf of the Russian intelligence service before stealing 7.5TB of sensitive data and sharing this freely with other hackers and journalists. Attackers infiltrated the company network of SyTech on 13 July, according to BBC Russia, and began a process of copying data while deleting masses of it. ...
- Bulgaria’s hacked database is now available on hacking forums
July 18, 2019
The database of Bulgaria’s National Revenue Agency (NRA), which was hacked over the weekend and sent to local reporters, is now being shared on hacking forums, ZDNet has learned from sources in the threat intelligence community. Download links to the hacked database have been shared by a hacked data trader known as Instakilla, believed to be operating out of ...
- Marriott Hit With $123M Fine For Massive 2018 Data Breach
July 9, 2019
The U.K.’s privacy watchdog is hitting Marriott International with a $123 million (£99 million) penalty stemming from its 2018 data breach of more than 383 million guest records. The Tuesday fine is issued by the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) and comes only a day after the organization proposed a record $230 million fine against British Airways for its ...
- Hackers breached Greece’s top-level domain registrar
July 9, 2019
State-sponsored hackers have breached ICS-Forth, the organization that manages Greece’s top-level domain country codes of .gr and .el. ICS-Forth, which stands for the Institute of Computer Science of the Foundation for Research and Technology, publicly admitted to the security incident in emails it sent ot domain owners on April 19. The hackers behind the breach are the same group ...
- MongoDB Leak Exposed Millions of Medical Insurance Records
June 28, 2019
Millions of records containing personal information and medical insurance data were exposed by a database belonging to insurance marketing website MedicareSupplement.com. An online database belonging to insurance marketing website MedicareSupplement.com was found exposing more than 5 million records with personal information. MedicareSupplement.com is a U.S.-based marketing site that allows users to find supplemental medical insurance available in their ...