WCS Security Breach Update

Published October 9, 2008

There have been no indications of identity theft resulting from the accidental release of student information that the school district learned of earlier this year.  That’s according to National ID Recovery, NIDR, the firm hired to provide identity protection for students whose social security numbers were on the internet several weeks during the fall of 2007.  Those students are ones who took the second grade TCAP and most of those who took the ACT during the 2006-07 school year.  Director of Schools Dr. Rebecca Sharber shared an update with the Williamson County Board of Education during its work session meeting on October 7.

Sharber reported that as of October 3, 2008, 4,829 parents of students, or more than 90 percent, who were affected by the release of social security numbers have signed up for the identity protection offered by NIDR.  Sharber said that according to the company this is a very high response rate and none of the identity monitoring results shows any indication of identity theft.

In addition, NIDR had 54 people contact them with questions on an 18 year old or older child’s credit report.  Sharber reported that of those, 51 were easily corrected errors on the credit reports themselves.  Three of these calls did appear to be possible identity thefts, but after NIDR conducted an investigation it was discovered that two of these cases were creditor reporting errors, and NIDR was able to correct those errors.  The other case was a collection agency that had performed a skip trace on name only, which created a hit on the child’s name. NIDR has also corrected that situation. 

The Board asked Sharber to provide additional information regarding identify theft monitoring services to the group at a future meeting.