Recover Lost Documents

In Tennessee, the personal information on more than 18,000 Metro students and about 6,000 parents was searchable on Google for three months.

Amy Griffith Graydon stated in her report for the Nashville City Paper that the security breach was discovered when a parent “Google searched” her child’s name and found information including a Social Security number, address and birth date. Student racial information was also included.

The breach was made by Public Consulting Group, a contractor with the Tennessee Department of Education.

PCG employees reportedly made an error late last year as they transferred a database of information corresponding to all Metro students. During the transfer, copies of some of the information was written to an insecure server. The Google search engine accessed the insecure server during a regular “crawl” of the Internet, then cached the information.

The file with the information, which was available through Google searches for three months, was accessed four times. Stephen Skinner, a principal at the Boston-based PCG, stated that there are no indications that anyone tried to deliberately access the data.

PCG is offering affected families free access to identity theft and online credit monitoring, in addition to a $2 million insurance policy protecting enrollees from certain identity theft-related losses.

Families of students and parents whose information was made public were to be notified in writing within a week at the time of Graydon’s article.