Alabama State Department of Education data breach: What does this mean for you?

The extent of the breach is not yet known, but hackers might have personal data on students and employees.

That means the hackers could have access to full names, phone numbers, email addresses, home addresses and even social security numbers.“They will take this information and potentially sell it to others if there’s value there,” Marc Sachs, a Cyber Security expert said.“We certainly don’t want to minimize it, but it’s certainly something you don’t want to lose sleep over,” Sachs said.

The state department, federal agencies and an outside contractor were able to interrupt the hack before it gained access to the entire system. “You think of your cyber network as sort of a big maze, they’re able to sort of trap or kick out the bad guys out of the maze,” Former U.S. attorney Jay Town said.Town, the Vice President of Gray Analytics, say hackers are not like they are in the movies, and hacking is typically not a difficult task.

“There’s some guy sitting with a keyboard that guesses passwords and finds his way into the network,” Town said. “It’s usually something a little more common like sort of phishing emails. We have to invest in our networks, our infrastructure is woefully behind where it should be and these threat hackers know it and they target.”Copyright 2024 WAFF. All rights reserved.

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