According to an official statement from the Twin Falls School District, on December 28th, 2024, PowerSchool was infiltrated by an unauthorized and unidentified hacker. This led to not only a breach for the students and parents of the Twin Falls School District, but for every school district in the United States which utilizes the PowerSchool tool.
In a follow-up statement, the District said, “This breach occurred on PowerSchool’s platform, not at the local level, and has impacted PowerSchool’s clients nationwide.”
The District also explained that “the information available to us at this time suggests that our records were not part of this unauthorized access… PowerSchool is our student information software. It includes general student information such as name, address, phone number, etc. NO SOCIAL SECURITY NUMBERS ARE STORED in the TFSD PowerSchool portal.”
According to CRHS Principal Randall Miskin, alongside the PowerSchool hacking, there have been cases of individual student Chromebooks being hacked as well. The culprits are unknown. The number of known individual Chromebooks being hacked throughout the district is fewer than ten, and the school district’s overall network is not compromised.
To combat these measures, however, many advisory classes had their students change the passwords on their Chromebooks. CRHS computers teacher Mrs. Henley stated, “We were told in a staff meeting that advisory teachers needed all of their students to change their passwords on their Chromebooks because they were being hacked.”
Mr. Miskin, however, discussed, “There have been some individual Chromebooks hacked which are potentially from the district. I don’t know which people, and I don’t know which schools, but I know that they have been hacked and have had all of their files deleted. We are thinking about changing Chromebook passwords monthly so that these algorithms cannot exploit our Chromebooks. We don’t want our student’s personal information on the Chromebooks such as financial information getting leaked to hackers.”
It is unlikely that those who hacked into Chromebook accounts are connected with those who hacked PowerSchool nationwide. There is no evidence of a connection between the separate incidents.
