19-year-old student to plead guilty to huge school database hack
1 min read
Summary
19-year-old Matthew Lane, a college student from Massachusetts, has agreed to plead guilty to four charges, including cyber extortion, unauthorised access to protected computers and aggravated identity theft, for his part in hacking the US student information system PowerSchool.
The Department of Justice (DoJ) alleges that Lane broke into the system using stolen login credentials, before transferring the personal data of millions of students and teachers to a server based in Ukraine.
Lane also allegedly breached and extorted a US telecoms company, although PowerSchool - the company whose data he allegedly stole - was not named in the court documents.
As part of the hack, Lane is said to have threatened to leak the personal details of tens of millions of students and teachers, including names, email addresses, phone numbers and dates of birth unless the company paid a $2.85m ransom.
The DoJ estimates that Lane inflicted over $4m in losses on his victims.