Irish National Teacher’s Organization(INTO) has issued a formal statement that personal data of more than 30,000 Irish Teachers could have been compromised due to a cyber attack on a union website. INTO has written to all those teachers and retired staff who have completed courses on its learning website intolearning dot ie and updated them about the situation.
The association has also issued a formal statement that no financial and credit card details were compromised due to the breach as the payments are processed separately via a secure third party processing facility called Realex.
The teachers association of Ireland has also assured that all passwords which were leaked in the breach are in encrypted form and so will remain inaccessible to hackers.
INTO Assistant General Secretary Peter Mullan said individual names, email addresses, city, country, gender, and logged info from online courses were leaked to hackers. Mullan added that an initial investigation into the breach has identified the use of the online learning server as a base to send spam messages.
A full report on the attack is awaited and in the meantime, the website has been taken down to avoid any untoward situation further.
INTO has informed the Office of the Irish Data Protection Commissioner about the breach and are taking the advice and direction from them.
Gardai, the police force of Ireland has also received information about the breach from Irish National Teacher’s Organization and they have launched a separate investigation on this note.
