Hackers Are Leaking Children's Data — and There's Little Parents Can Do

NBC News collected and analyzed school files from dark web pages and found they’re littered with personal information of children

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Most don’t have bank passwords. Few have credit scores yet. And still, parts of the internet are awash in the personal information of millions of schoolchildren. 

The ongoing wave of ransomware attacks has cost companies and institutions billions of dollars and exposed personal information about everyone from hospital patients to police officers. It’s also swept up school districts, meaning files from thousands of schools are currently visible on those hackers’ sites. 

NBC News collected and analyzed school files from those sites and found they’re littered with personal information of children. In 2021, ransomware gangs published data from more than 1,200 American K-12 schools, according to a tally provided to NBC Newsby Brett Callow, a ransomware analyst at the cybersecurity company Emsisoft.

Some schools contacted about the leaks appeared unaware of the problem. And even after schools are able to resume operations following an attack, parents have little recourse when their children’s information is leaked. 

Read the full story on NBCNews.com here. 

President Joe Biden said Monday that his office is expecting an intelligence report on Tuesday morning regarding the massive hack against Microsoft Exchange’s email server software, saying, “My understanding is that the Chinese government, not unlike the Russian government, is not doing this themselves but are protecting those who are doing it, and maybe even accommodating them being able to do it.”
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