Pueblo school district heightens security after an online breach

Pueblo City School District 60 is increasing security after a student found a way to access other students’ accounts.

The Pueblo Chieftain reports that a student demonstrated how simple it was to access other students’ accounts since the username and password are almost identical on Infinite Campus, the program students use that has grades, attendance records, missing assignments, class schedules, immunization records, grade-point averages, home addresses, telephone numbers, names of family members, and assessment scores.

D60 told KRDO NewsChannel 13 that only high school students changed their passwords early Friday morning after it learned about the incident. It went on to say it did this because it thought high school students would be more encouraged to experiment what the student demonstrated to the Chieftain.

The district said middle and elementary school students will have their passwords changed on Monday and the reason why it wasn’t changed on Friday was because it didn’t know how much help it would need from its help desk since there are about 18,000 students in D60.

D60 said elementary school students will need to do it Monday because teacher’s need to log each student’s password.

As for if students’ accounts will be protected until Monday, D60 said it is on heighten security for the weekend to make sure this doesn’t happen again.

The Chieftain said the student did not want to be identified and did not want to inform the district of this because he feared that he would face disciplinary action.

D60 said the student wouldn’t have been in trouble, and it would have welcomed information.