Education technology giant PowerSchool has confirmed a data breach that may have exposed information on millions of schoolchildren, putting them at risk of identity theft. PowerSchool has over 18,000 clients,

The hack has the potential to be one of the biggest of the year, but the edtech giant is refusing to answer important questions

Professor noted the need for continued pushes for multi-factor authentication for educational services that require such extensive identifying information.

Bleeping Computer on Wednesday also reported that an extortion note the attacker sent to PowerSchool claimed that the personal data of 62.4 million students and 9.5 million teachers was swept up in the breach. PowerSchool said it’s offering two years of free credit monitoring to all those affected.

PowerSchool, a software provider popular at K-12 schools, was the target of a data breach in late December that affected many districts in the U.S. and in other countries, according to the company and several impacted schools .

A trove of information on current and former students and teachers was accessed during the December cyberattack, sources say

PowerSchool, a widely used platform among districts in western Washington, including Seattle and Everett, confirmed the breach.

The hacker who breached education tech giant PowerSchool claimed in an extortion demand that they stole the personal data of 62.4 million students and 9.5 million teachers.

As reported by BleepingComputer, the personal data of 62.4 million students and 9.5 million teachers was exposed during the attack when the threat actor used stolen credentials to access the PowerSchool customer support portal. After which, they used a maintenance access tool to download the data from districts’ PowerSIS databases.

Four decades of student and educator information was stolen from PowerSchool – tens of millions are potentially affected.