Employees with the Fort Worth Independent School District are apparently among a number of employees of Texas school districts whose personal information was inadvertently published online last month by the Texas Association of School Boards.
Some employees of the district received an email Friday alerting them to a "data security incident" that "exposed some of your personal information to the Internet."
The district informed employees that the exposure by the TASB was not isolated to the FWISD and that tens of thousands of school employees from hundreds of Texas districts were affected by the error.
The Texas Association of School Boards confirmed Friday in a statement that last month they published online personal information of some people employed in Texas school districts through an application they use to report wages to the Texas Workforce Commission. The information reported is part of an unemployment compensation group program administered by the TASB.
The TASB said in a statement Friday that after being told the information had been published they immediately took the application offline and began an investigation into the incident. Meanwhile, the TASB is in the process of notifying the districts involved so that the employees of those districts can also be notified.
"For affected employees, TASB is providing a hotline for questions and a one-year membership to a credit monitoring and identity fraud product," the agency said in a statement.
NBC 5 has reached out to the TASB to determine exactly how many people have been affected and specifically what personal information was published. As of this writing, the TASB has not replied to those questions.
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The TASB said in a prepared statement they are "taking a variety of corrective actions including implementing additional security protocols to the application that caused the problem, conducting a comprehensive review of all electronic resources that contain sensitive information, increasing the frequency and scope of security scans, and expanding security training for all TASB staff."
