The FBI Built a Fake Town, $3.5 Billion Lost to Scammers & a School Breach Hitting 11 Million Kids

This week's Breach of the Week.

[upbeat music] Right.

This week's breach, hackers stole data on 137,000 school staff, and the system they targeted manages records for 11 million kids.

So this is, of course, ShinyHunters.

ShinyHunters, they didn't need to break into a school because they found a side door through the cloud software that the school uses to manage everything from staff contracts to student records.

So this attack actually happened in March, but it's taken until this week for the full picture to emerge.

So they've breached Infinite Campus, which is one of the most widely used school management systems in the United States.

Infinite Campus is used by over 3,200 school districts across 46 states, which means it manages records for 11 million students.

Uh, they targeted their Salesforce account in March.

Uh, the full scale has only become clear this week.

So the data stolen includes names, email addresses, phone numbers, home addresses, job titles, and support tickets for 137,000 school staff.

Wow.

ShinyHunters have published a sample of the stolen data online, and Have I Been Pwned have confirmed the exposure.

Infinite Campus say that no student data- databases were compromised, only staff data, but the investigation is ongoing.

And this is really similar to a 2020, December 2024 PowerSchool hack in which 62 million students were affected, uh, and the perpetrator of that was sentenced to four years in prison.

I-

Mm.

ShinyHunters, if anyone ever catches up with them, whoever they may be, it's-

Mm.

Yeah.

That would probably be the hard part because-

Of course

... there's more, many people involved.

Yeah.

Yeah.