Indian Prairie School District informed the community this week that the names and birthdates of nearly 50,000 current and former students have been compromised.
“There was an email that came out from the school informing us that there was a data breach,” said a parent Abdan Nadgauda.
Nadgauda’s daughter Ananya is about to start her junior year at Waubonsie Valley High School.
“It’s kind of scary that data could be breached like that,” said Ananya Nadgauda.
According to the district, the breach happened due to a product provided by Pearson Clinical Assessment, which is used to track student progress.
It is said that 49,000 students enrolled in the district between 2001 and 2016 were affected. The names and email addresses of about 2300 staff members were also compromised.
“It’s very shocking to me…I thought it was a very safe school and that all of my information was protected so that caught me very off guard,” said former student Brooke Novak.
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Indian Prairie School District said in a statement, “we take very seriously the security of all student, family and staff data. only the most limited data is provided to vendors for required services.”
About 13,000 schools and universities across the country that use the Pearson product are affected by the breach and anyone affected will have access to free credit monitoring as a precaution.
“Yeah, we’ll take advantage of it because it’s good to figure out if someone has used the data or not,” said Abdan Nadgauda.
Pearson said in a statement that “protecting our customers’ information is of critical importance to us. we have strict data protections in place and have reviewed this incident, found and fixed the vulnerability.”
About 3700 students and 800 staff members in Naperville School District 203 were also affected and the district is telling the community that there is no evidence that the information was misused but the notification was made out of an abundance of caution.
