Florida Virtual School Data Breach

What happened

In March 2018, the Florida Virtual School (FLVS) posted a data breach notification to their website. The school had identified a data breach which had occurred sometime between 6 May 2016 and 12 Feb 2018 and an XML file containing 368k student records was subsequently found circulating. Each record contained student name, date of birth, password, grade, email and parent email resulting in a total of 543k unique email addresses. Due to the prevalence of email addresses belonging to individuals who are still legally children, the data breach has been flagged as "sensitive".

Exposed data

Recommended actions

• Change your Florida Virtual School password immediately, and update it anywhere you reused the same password.
• Enable two-factor authentication on the affected account and on your critical services (email, banking).
• Watch for targeted phishing emails referencing Florida Virtual School — attackers weaponise breach data quickly.
• Exposed identity data raises identity-theft risk — consider credit monitoring or a credit freeze.
• Check whether your email address appears in this breach on haveibeenpwned.com.