THE CRUNCH
The Florida Department of Education says hackers breached its student financial aid website, potentially exposing personal information belonging to roughly 4.9 million people. The department discovered the intrusion on October 19 and says it has since contained the breach after launching its incident response procedures.
The affected site, FloridaStudentFinancialAidSG.org, is the online hub for Florida's state-funded scholarship and grant programmes. Past applicants for state financial aid could fall within the affected group, although the department stresses that not everyone in that group will have had data taken, and what was exposed differs from person to person.
The attackers may have reached names, Social Security numbers, dates of birth, home addresses, phone numbers, email addresses and gender codes. The entry method and those behind the intrusion remain unknown, and no hacking group has come forward to claim it. The Florida Digital Service and the Florida Department of Law Enforcement are helping with the response.
Students' existing aid is safe, according to the department: the breach will not delay disbursements or tuition payments, nor change eligibility for scholarships, grants or student loans. As clean-up work continues, some department websites and online services could be temporarily unavailable.
The incident follows a September breach at the Florida Department of Highway Safety and Motor Vehicles, where hackers accessed the driver database via compromised credentials belonging to a local police department user. That agency did not name the ShinyHunters extortion group, which had claimed to have stolen more than 200,000 driver records.