The Pennsylvania State Education Association this week confirmed it notified 517,487 people of a July 2024 data breach that compromised the following personal info including SSNs, passwords, routing numbers, credit/debit card numbers, and a lot more.
Ransomware gang Rhysida claimed responsibility for the breach in September 2024 but the PSEA has not yet verified Rhysida’s claim.
In a blog post reporting this news, Paul Bischoff, Consumer Privacy Advocate at Comparitech, wrote:
“Rhysida is thought to have ties to the ransomware group Vice Society and first surfaced in May 2023. Its ransomware can steal data and lock down targeted systems. It then demands a ransom both for deleting stolen data and for a key to restore infected systems. Rhysida has claimed 82 confirmed ransomware attacks since it began, compromising more than 5.3 million records. Its average ransom demand is $1.08 million.”
“Ransomware attacks can both steal data and lock down computer systems. Organizations are then forced to either pay a ransom or face extended downtime, data loss, and putting data subjects at increased risk of fraud.”
“In 2024, Comparitech researchers logged 74 confirmed ransomware attacks on the US education sector, 72 of which were against schools and colleges. These attacks compromised more than 3 million records in total. Rhysida’s attack on the PSEA is the third-largest of the year by number of records affected. The largest such attacks in 2024 were on Texas Tech University Health Sciences Center (1.5 million) and Chicago Public Schools (700,000).”
“In 2025 so far, we are tracking nine confirmed ransomware attacks on US education, plus another 31 unconfirmed claims that haven’t been acknowledged by the targeted organizations.”
This is yet another bad situation where a threat actor is about to cause lots of misery to lots of people for many years to come. That illustrates why we all need to wrap our heads around protecting organizations from threat actors who mean to do harm to us all.
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This entry was posted on March 19, 2025 at 3:11 pm and is filed under Commentary with tags Comparitech. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.
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Pennsylvania State Education Association notifies 500K people of data breach VIA a ransomware gang
The Pennsylvania State Education Association this week confirmed it notified 517,487 people of a July 2024 data breach that compromised the following personal info including SSNs, passwords, routing numbers, credit/debit card numbers, and a lot more.
Ransomware gang Rhysida claimed responsibility for the breach in September 2024 but the PSEA has not yet verified Rhysida’s claim.
In a blog post reporting this news, Paul Bischoff, Consumer Privacy Advocate at Comparitech, wrote:
“Rhysida is thought to have ties to the ransomware group Vice Society and first surfaced in May 2023. Its ransomware can steal data and lock down targeted systems. It then demands a ransom both for deleting stolen data and for a key to restore infected systems. Rhysida has claimed 82 confirmed ransomware attacks since it began, compromising more than 5.3 million records. Its average ransom demand is $1.08 million.”
“Ransomware attacks can both steal data and lock down computer systems. Organizations are then forced to either pay a ransom or face extended downtime, data loss, and putting data subjects at increased risk of fraud.”
“In 2024, Comparitech researchers logged 74 confirmed ransomware attacks on the US education sector, 72 of which were against schools and colleges. These attacks compromised more than 3 million records in total. Rhysida’s attack on the PSEA is the third-largest of the year by number of records affected. The largest such attacks in 2024 were on Texas Tech University Health Sciences Center (1.5 million) and Chicago Public Schools (700,000).”
“In 2025 so far, we are tracking nine confirmed ransomware attacks on US education, plus another 31 unconfirmed claims that haven’t been acknowledged by the targeted organizations.”
This is yet another bad situation where a threat actor is about to cause lots of misery to lots of people for many years to come. That illustrates why we all need to wrap our heads around protecting organizations from threat actors who mean to do harm to us all.
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This entry was posted on March 19, 2025 at 3:11 pm and is filed under Commentary with tags Comparitech. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.