Thursday, Jan. 9, 2025
Dear Parents and Guardians,
We wanted to share an important update about a cyber incident experienced by Near North District School Board (NNDSB) involving PowerSchool – the application used by NNDSB and many school boards across North America to store a range of student information and a limited amount of staff information.
On Tuesday, Jan. 7, 2025, PowerSchool notified the board and other school boards in Ontario and across North America that they had experienced a data breach between Dec. 22-28, 2024.
Our cybersecurity team promptly activated our response plan, taking immediate steps to ensure that our critical systems remain operational.
Working with PowerSchool, we are conducting a thorough investigation to understand the nature of the incident and what personal information may have been affected. At this point in time, we are still assessing the exact information that may have been accessed or exported from the application. PowerSchool has informed us that it has received confirmation that the data accessed by an unauthorized user has been deleted and that no copies of this data were posted online.
When we determine what personal information has been impacted, we will let you know as soon as possible. In the meantime, we have proactively notified the Ontario Information and Privacy Commissioner of this incident.
We know this news may be concerning, but please know that we are doing everything possible to learn more from PowerSchool about what occurred and will share that information with you.
Many of you will have questions as a result of this news, but given the ongoing investigation into what occurred, we do not yet have more information to share at this time.
We will continue to update the community as more information becomes available.
Sincerely,
Near North District School Board
