Texas sues PowerSchool over breach exposing 62M students, 880k Texans

Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton has filed a lawsuit against PowerSchool after a December breach exposed the personal information of 62 million students, including over 880,000 Texans, according to the Office of the Attorney General of Texas. PowerSchool disclosed that its PowerSource customer portal was breached on 19 December 2024, through a subcontractor’s stolen credentials, with the attacker demanding a ransom of $2.85 million in Bitcoin on 28 December 2024.

The breach is linked to a threat actor that claimed to have stolen data for 62.4 million students and 9.5 million teachers from 6,505 school districts across the US, Canada and other countries. The Texas suit alleges that PowerSchool’s security practices and disclosures violated the Texas Deceptive Trade Practices Act and the Identity Theft Enforcement and Protection Act. The complaint comes after reports that the attacker began extorting individual school districts in early May 2025.