Jay Calvert In the News

Avoiding Ransom Payments: Lessons from Powerschool Breach

These are cybercriminals we are dealing, the lowest of the low. Do you really their ‘word’ matters when they say they will release your data to you? Or, not release the data they stole from you online in to the dark web? Not a chance!

Citynews.ca reports that Powerschool, a company that makes a database management system used for tracking student information, was ransomwared in 2024. Powerschool paid the ransom and were promised that the information stolen was destroyed after they paid the ransom.

The Toronto District School Board today, announced that the data believed to have been destroyed was not in fact, destroyed and the data is now being used to ransomware the school boards whose data was stored in the Powerschool breach in 2024. This affects the Toronto District School Board as well as several other school boards in North America.

Full article here and the press release from the TDSB here.

Jay Calvert In the News

19 Billion Passwords Published Online

From Forbes: https://www.forbes.com/sites/daveywinder/2025/05/05/new-warning—19-billion-compromised-passwords-create-hacking-arsenal/

According to Forbes, a confirmed list of stolen passwords are being made available on the dark web and in criminal forums. “There were 19,030,304,929 passwords that were compromised by leaks and breaches of the course of 12 months from April 2024 involving 200 security incidents”

“Only 6% of them [were unique]” – totalling 1,143,815,266 unique passwords

What this means to you, well, your password could very well be on this list. To check if you account was involved in any of the breaches you could check Have I been Pwned? – see our article here.

Alternatively, this is reminder to do the following;

  • Use unique passwords on each site / service you have an account
  • Use complex passwords
  • Change your password yearly or in the case of a known compromise, immediately.

More information: Hackers use these lists to brute force their way into an account. Once they have a list of passwords to try, they will set their high powered systems against your account and try thousands of variations a minute, chances are with 1,143,815,266 unique passwords, your password could be on that list.