14 DAY TRIAL // Around 80,000 Chicago Public Schools volunteers, employees, and vendors had their personal information stolen in a security incident involving a former CPS worker, as reported by the Chicago Sun-Times.
According to CPS Chief Operating Officer Arnie Rivera, the school district discovered the data breach incident on October 31, one day after the data was stolen by former employee Kristi Sims.
The files were recovered after Chicago police officers were able to apprehend the snatched data following the execution of a search warrant issued to the name of Kristi Sims, former CPS administrative tasks contractor for the Office of Safety and Security.
As reported by Chicago Sun-Times, the files Krims allegedly stole contained "names, employee ID numbers, phone numbers, addresses, dates of birth, criminal arrest histories and DCFS findings." No social security numbers were compromised.
Rivera also stated that “There was no indication that the information, which was in the individual’s possession for approximately 24 hours, was used or disseminated to anyone in any way.”
The personal information allegedly stolen by the former CPS employee was not distributed to third parties
Furthermore, as CPS spokesman Anthony Guglielmi said, Krims is also the main suspect in the deletion of the files which were stolen from the school district's database.
After being arrested and taken in custody by the Chicago Police Department, Krims now faces multiple counts of identity theft and aggravated computer tampering and appeared in court on Friday morning.
This was not the first data breach suffered by CPS since in June their Office of Access and Enrollment accidentally mass-mailed a spreadsheet with the private personal information of over 3,700 students and their families.
Also, CPS also publicly exposed their students’ dates of birth and medical conditions stored in a spreadsheet on an unprotected server, as well as leaked the students' names, addresses, and current schools in 2016.