Cybersecurity in the News

Matthew Lane, a 20 year old MA college student pulled off the biggest cybersecurity attack in US education history, and recently he's broken his silence about the entire incident, right before going to prison. He said he's glad he was caught, because he claims he was addicted to hacking. The ABC article goes deep into his life and the path that led him here.

The hack itself broke into a system known as PowerSchool, which is used by over 80% of school districts in the US. According to the Justice Department, the hack risked leaking private information on 60 million kids and 10 million teachers. As stated in court documents, Lane used a contractor's credentials to rummage through their systems undetected. Then, PowerSchool had received a multitude of threatening messages, saying millions of children's data would be released if 3 million dollars was not transferred in cryptocurrency.

It would be incredibly hard to avoid this type of attack, but there are ways to prevent it. Matthew Lane used the credentials of officials at PowerSchool, because they were entirely available online. To prevent this from happening in the future, it'd be best to not access such sensitive materials through accessible credentials online. Something like a two-step verification system to ensure that the person logging in with their information is truly that person. 

Article Validity:

Author - Mike Levine

Publisher - ABC News

Date - April 14th, 2026

Truthfulness - Info on hack is provable in court documents

Presentation - Professional in its interview, written to inform

Links are listed above within.

For the second time in just over a year, Anthropic's Claude (their generative AI to rival ChatGPT) Code leaked; this accidental leak consisting of over 500,000 lines of code. 

According to the Axios article, the leak exposed the entirety of the coding architecture, handing the public, and competitors, all the information that they've been working on. As stated in the "state of play" section, Axios reports that a file used internally for debugging was accidentally bundled into a routine update of Claude Code and then pushed to the public registry.

While Anthropic claims no customer data was leaked, the privacy of their code has now been entirely leaked in what they're calling "human error." Even if no user data was leaked, the fact that such a big mistake to leak data can be made, it puts into question the trustworthiness of these AI companies (if that wasn't already a problem for them with their business practices).

Limiting human error is not entirely easy, but there are ways to prepare for mistakes; Anthropic could put more people on double checking exactly what is bundled to the code, so that there are way more guard-rails to stop something like this from happening. 

Article Validity:

Author - Madison Mills

Publisher - Axios 

Date - March 31st, 2026

Truthfulness - Said by other news sites, doesn't give opinions

Presentation - It was written to inform in a professional way

Links are listed above within.