By Lucas Ropek Published May 21, 2025 | Comments (0) | © MediaNews Group/Los Angeles Daily News (Getty Images) A Massachusetts teenager has pled guilty to a number of hacking crimes, including his role in the penetration of a cloud company with data on tens of millions of children, the government says. On Wednesday, the Justice Department said that 19-year-old Matthew D. Lane of Sterling, Massachusetts, had entered into a plea agreement with the government for his role in a number of high-profile hacking episodes. The former college student pled guilty to aggravated identity theft, as well as other crimes. Lane’s plea agreement and a criminal complaint against him were posted to the Justice Department’s website, along with additional information about the teen’s criminal antics. Lane is accused of personally hacking a company using leaked employee credentials. While this company hasn’t been named in court documents, NBC has reported that the victim is PowerSchool, a cloud and analytics provider that says it services K-12 schools across North America. NBC describes it as “one of the top tech education companies” in the country. Lane’s compromise of it last year led to the theft of data on tens of millions of children. The information that Lane stole included the “Social Security numbers, dates of birth, and confidential medical information, among other data, of the students and faculty” sourced from the company’s network. Not long after Lane stole the data, the company received an extortion message, the government says. That message threatened to “leak . . . worldwide” the “names, email addresses, phone numbers, Social Security numbers, dates of birth, medical information, residential addresses, parent and guardian information, and passwords, among other data, of more than 60 million students and 10 million teachers if Victim 2 did not send 30 Bitcoin (approximately $2.85 million at the time) to a specific Bitcoin address,” federal prosecutors wrote. Gizmodo reached out to PowerSchool for comment. According to the Justice Department, Lane was also part of a criminal group that stole data from a telecommunications firm and then sought to extort the company for $200,000. It is unknown who actually hacked the telecom, though Lane is said to have used an anonymous email to contact the telecom directly, telling it to fork over the ransom in Bitcoin or suffer a humiliating data breach. Lane purportedly said: “We are the only ones with a copy of this data now. Stop this nonsense [or] your executives and employees will see the same fate . . . . Make the correct decision and pay the ransom. If you keep stalling, it will be leaked.” “Matthew Lane apparently thought he found a way to get rich quick, but this 19-year-old now stands accused of hiding behind his keyboard to gain unauthorized access to an education software provider to obtain sensitive data which was used in an attempt to extort millions of dollars,” said FBI official Kimberly Milka. Daily Newsletter You May Also Like By AJ Dellinger Published May 18, 2025 By AJ Dellinger Published April 29, 2025 Jake Pearson, ProPublica Published April 29, 2025 By AJ Dellinger Published April 15, 2025 By Matthew Gault Published March 26, 2025 By Passant Rabie Published March 26, 2025

A Massachusetts man has agreed to plead guilty to hacking into one of the top education tech companies in the United States and stealing tens of millions of schoolchildren's personal information for profit. From a report: Matthew Lane, 19, of Worcester County, Massachusetts, signed a plea agreement related to charges connected to a major hack on an educational technology company last year, as well as another company, according to court documents published Tuesday. While the documents refer to the education company only as "Victim-2" and the U.S. attorney's office declined to name the victim, a person familiar with the matter told NBC News that it is PowerSchool. The hack of PowerSchool last year is believed to be the largest breach of American children's sensitive data to date. According to his plea agreement, Lane admitted obtaining information from a protected computer and aggravated identity theft and agreed not to challenge a prison sentence shorter than nine years and four months. He got access simply by trying an employee's stolen username and password combination, the complaint says, echoing a private third-party assessment of the incident previously reported by NBC News. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

w/s/l? Microsoft closes 9-year-old feature request, open-sources Windows Subsystem for Linux WSL has also recently added official support for both Fedora and Arch distros. Andrew Cunningham – May 19, 2025 1:49 pm | 23 Credit: Microsoft Credit: Microsoft Story text Size Small Standard Large Width * Standard Wide Links Standard Orange * Subscribers only   Learn more Microsoft's Windows Subsystem for Linux has become an important tool for developers and power users since it was introduced in the Windows 10 Anniversary Update back in 2016, giving them access to a built-in Linux command line and Linux applications from within Windows. The company has steadily improved WSL since then, improving performance, making it easier to install and use, and adding features like GPU and audio support. But today as part of its Build developer conference, Microsoft announced that it would be making almost all of WSL open source, closing the very first issue that the then-new WSL project attracted on Github in 2016. "WSL could never have been what it is today without its community," writes Microsoft Senior Software Engineer Pierre Boulay in the company's blog post. "We’ve seen how much the community has contributed to WSL without access to the source code, and we can’t wait to see how WSL will evolve now that the community can make direct code contributions to the project." Only two elements of WSL remain closed-source for now: an lxcore.sys kernel driver used for WSL 1 (the initial version of WSL that is still supported, though new installs default to 2019's WSL 2); and the p9rdr.sys and p9np.dll files that handle filesystem redirection from Windows to Linux (in other words, making it so that Windows can easily access the Linux filesystem). Microsoft didn't close the door to open-sourcing those components but also didn't say if or when it planned to make them open source. Though WSL uses some of the same technologies as virtual machines, WSL's speed, low resource usage, and integration with Windows makes it much more seamless to install and use than traditional virtual machines that maintain more separation between the host and guest operating system. Around the release of Windows 11 in 2021, Microsoft made WSL something that was installed and updated via the Microsoft Store rather than something built into the operating system, making it easier to add new features without requiring the potential disruption of a full Windows update (and also possibly making it easier to open source the code without posting source code for other parts of Windows). This isn't the only major improvement Microsoft has helped to release for WSL recently. Earlier this month, the company announced that Fedora is now an officially supported WSL distribution, joining Ubuntu (still the default) and a number of other distributions. Arch Linux also became an officially supported distribution back in April; both Fedora and Arch are taking advantage of changes Microsoft announced last year to make it easier to build new WSL distributions. Windows users can install WSL by choosing a distribution from the Microsoft Store or by opening a command-line window and typing wsl --install. Users can install multiple distributions at once and switch between them based on what they're running or testing; typing wsl --list --online at the command line will also show you all of the distributions that Microsoft officially supports if you don't want to use Ubuntu. Andrew Cunningham Senior Technology Reporter Andrew Cunningham Senior Technology Reporter Andrew is a Senior Technology Reporter at Ars Technica, with a focus on consumer tech including computer hardware and in-depth reviews of operating systems like Windows and macOS. Andrew lives in Philadelphia and co-hosts a weekly book podcast called Overdue. 23 Comments