A Massachusetts college student was sentenced to four years in prison for hacking and extorting two companies, including PowerSchool.
The individual, Matthew D. Lane, pleaded guilty in May to hacking into the networks of a telecommunications service provider and another company, and to extorting roughly $3 million from them.
Documents presented in court showed that, between April 2024 and May 2024, Lane and his co-conspirators extorted $200,000 from the telecommunications company, threatening to leak customer information stolen from its network in 2022.
Lane was also charged with using stolen login credentials to access the network of a company that provides software and cloud storage to school systems in the US, Canada, and elsewhere.
According to court documents, Lane accessed the second company’s network in September 2024, and then again in December, when he exfiltrated student and teacher information.
The hackers stole names, addresses, dates of birth, phone numbers, email addresses, Social Security numbers, medical information, and other data, and threatened to leak it unless a $2.85 million ransom was paid in Bitcoin.
While the victim company was not named, the description of the attack is consistent with the PowerSchool hack that was estimated to have affected roughly 70 million individuals.
PowerSchool in May confirmed paying a ransom to prevent the data leak and ensure data erasure, but the attackers did not delete the stolen information and started extorting school districts in the US and Canada.
Documents presented in court show that Lane returned roughly $160,000 of the illicit funds received from the victims, but most of the $3 million remains unaccounted for.
Lane was sentenced to four years in prison and three years of supervised release. He was also ordered to pay $14 million in restitution and a $25,000 fine.
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