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Technology director says PowerSchool breach did not affect Huntington County district
Summary
IT director Mike Sumter told the board the national PowerSchool cloud breach was "massive," but said Huntington’s on-premises PowerSchool instance was not compromised and no student or teacher data was lost; he outlined recent cybersecurity investments and backup plans.
Huntington County Community School Corporation’s technology director told the board the national PowerSchool breach affected many districts but did not compromise Huntington’s systems.
Mike Sumter described the PowerSchool attack as "massive," telling the board it appeared to involve tens of millions of student records taken from cloud-hosted instances. "The PowerSchool data breach was massive," Sumter said. He explained that the districts most impacted had their PowerSchool databases hosted in PowerSchool’s cloud and that the intruder had access for several days in some cases.
Sumter said Huntington’s PowerSchool databases are on-premises, a configuration he credited with protecting the district: "We were not affected," he said, and later added, "We did not lose any student data." He described steps the district has taken over the past three years to harden its defenses — upgrades to firewalls, blocking traffic from certain countries, endpoint protection through CrowdStrike (supported by a state/DHS grant) and plans to include additional security in the coming budget year.
Sumter told the board the district had benefited from state and federal help: the state worked with the Department of Homeland Security to obtain grant-funded cybersecurity tools for early-priority districts. He said the district will continue to invest in protections and contingency planning.
Board members thanked technology staff for their work and said they would continue to monitor PowerSchool’s remediation efforts and district security posture.
