The man who hacked into an education software platform has been sentenced for his crime.
Matthew Lane had pleaded guilty in June to hacking PowerSchool and taking the data, which belonged to millions of students and teachers, to extort the company, Reuters reported.
In all, 60 million students and 10 million teachers nationwide had their information exposed.
He will have to spend four years in prison and was ordered to pay $14 million in restitution and a $25,000 fine.
Lane was accused of using an earlier data breach of a telecommunications company and demanded that the company pay $200,000 ransom to avoid having the data leak. Then he used stolen logins to get into PowerSchool’s network and access the students’ and teachers’ data. He then demanded a ransom from that company or he would leak names, addresses and Social Security numbers, among other information, unless PowerSchool paid $2.85 million in bitcoin, The Associated Press reported in May before his guilty plea was entered.
PowerSchool paid the ransom to avoid the information from being leaked, according to Reuters.
Lane was a student at Assumption University in Worcester, Massachusetts, when he was charged. He pleaded guilty this year to engaging in cyber extortion, aggravated identity theft, and accessing protected computers without authorization, Reuters reported.