Some Ontario current and retired public high school teachers and related staff are being informed that their personal information was copied by a hacker as part of a ransomware attack on their union’s IT systems last spring.
The Ontario Secondary School Teachers Federation (OSSTF) said Wednesday that it learned on May 30 that an unauthorized third party had accessed and encrypted some of the union’s systems. The system was compromised about five days ago.
Members were quietly informed about the attack at the time. Now affected members are being told that their data has been stolen.
Caitlin Reid, the federation’s media and communications adviser, was not immediately available for comment. IT World Canada How many of its members are being informed, nor how many IT systems were encrypted by the attacker.
“It didn’t have much impact on the operation of the federation,” he said.
“We have immediately hired a forensic firm to stop the incident and investigate. We have now informed our members about this incident, that it is under investigation.
When asked why it took six months for members to be notified, Reed said an e-discovery process would have to be completed to review the personal information that would be affected. Which took several months to complete. “We reached out to members as soon as that process was complete.”
OSSTF has over 60,000 members across Ontario, including public high school teachers, occasional teachers, educational assistants, continuing education teachers and coaches, early childhood educators, psychologists, secretaries, speech-language pathologists, social workers, plant aides personnel, support staff of the University. and many more in the field of education.
In its statement, the union said that while it has no evidence at this time that members’ personal data has been misused, it will offer credit monitoring and identity theft protection services with Equifax to affected individuals based on the type of personal information affected. can provide. OSSTF expenditure for one year.
