Lexington County, SC (WLTX) Lexington School District Two is answering questions about a data breach that first came to light on Friday. News 19 caught up with the School District's attorney at a special board meeting about construction, Tuesday night.
Jake Moore tells News 19 that the district can only talk in generalities about the data breach, but he did say, Lexington District Two was not the only district hacked. He tells News 19, "We and a school district in Georgia were subject to a theft. What we have here is the cyber equivalent of someone breaking into our office and stealing files."
Those Files district officials said, on Friday, were W-2 information which includes names, addresses, social security numbers, and salary data. Thirteen hundred employees were affected by the breach. He says the district is cooperating with SLED to find out who is responsible for the stealing the data. And he says the District is going above and beyond what is required of them by law to try to protect employees from identity theft that could be a fall out of the breach. He says, "We have in place insurance that will protect our employees in matters of this nature. We have turned the matter over to our insurance company. We have been insured that we will get full and complete cooperation from the insurance carrier. we have notified all of the credit reporting services. We have looked at those things we are required to do under the law all of those have been done and we have even done more than what the law requires."
He also says the district was doing everything they could to prevent such a theft, but still they will do more self evaluation to try to make sure nothing like this happens again. He says, "We intend to look at what happened and if there is anything we can conceivably change to do any further protecting than we've already done, we'll do it."
In other district news, during the meeting the Board approved construction projects. One was a $2.9Million dollar interior renovation project at Airport High School. The renovations include restructuring and moving special needs and art and theater classes along with adding locker rooms, among other changes.
They also approved just over $600,000 for telephone and data drop system for the new Cayce Elementary School. The state of the art wiring will be for computer and other technology use.
In an effort to upgrade security systems, the Board approved and additional $89,000 for wiring for cameras.