A teenager who is known for being the person behind a historic hack that ended up in a $2 million has since ended up with prison time.
What became one of the largest education data breaches in recent history started off with 19-year-old Matthew Lane spending time on Roblox before going on to experiment with his hacking skills.
The teen targeted education technology company PowerSchool where he gained access to its systems and carried out a breach on an enormous scale.
The attack exposed sensitive data belonging to more than 60 million students and 10 million teachers, making it one of the most significant education-related hacks ever recorded.
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The information accessed included personal details such as names, addresses, and other highly sensitive records, which raised serious concerns about privacy and long-term security risks for those impacted.
But the drama didn’t stop there because after stealing the information, Lane then tried to extort the company by demanding a ransom of around $2 million in Bitcoin in exchange for not releasing the stolen data.
Unbelievably, the firm ended up coughing up the money for the ransom but that didn’t mean Lane would get away scot-free.
Despite attempts to cover his tracks using tools like VPNs, investigators were able to trace the attack back to Lane and he was ultimately arrested by authorities in his college dorm room.
The teen pleaded guilty to multiple charges which included cyber extortion, identity theft, and unauthorized access to protected systems.
This led to a prison sentence of four years along with millions of dollars in restitution tied to the damage caused by the breach.
Lane has since spoken to ABC News, where he revealed that he ‘needed to go to prison’.
He said: “I think I need to go to prison for what I did. It was disgusting, it was greedy, it was rooted in my own insecurities, it was wrong in every aspect.”
Supervisory Special Agent Doug Domin, who was in charge of the PowerSchool investigation from the FBI Boston field office, also said: “We’ve worked cases where individuals as young as 14 are being interviewed by the FBI.”
He added: “Parents need to understand what their kids are accessing, what platforms they’re on, putting barriers up, putting timers on technology.”
The agent went on to say that the people who had been impacted by Lane’s breach will ‘have to mitigate this issue for their entire life’.
He added: “They’re going to be re-victimized every time that dataset show up in the wild.”