New Skills Academy Suffers Data Breach

Subscribed users on the New Skills Academy Online Learning Platform have been informed by the company of a data breach. In accordance with their notification of this incident, the exact number of users who were affected by the occurrence is still unknown.

The British corporation, situated in Hertford, England, is one of the worlds most popular online learning platforms. The organization offers 800 courses to 800,000 registered users. The courses include a wide range of topics, including personal development, health and safety, professional growth, technology, business, and a variety of other subjects.

In an e-mail sent to its subscribers to notify them of the data breach, the company stated:

We are writing to inform you of an issue which may involve some of our New Skills Academy customers account information.

We have been notified that online education providers have been targeted by sources looking to acquire user data in recent weeks and, upon investigating our own systems, we discovered that some customer account information may have been exposed to unauthorized sources. The hackers did not obtain any banking information as a result of the data breach

Hackers were able to collect email addresses, encrypted passwords, and usernames from their websites compromised data.

Concerning the passwords, the encryption algorithm utilized by the corporation is unknown, making it difficult to determine whether the passwords can be decrypted.

The good news is that the New Skills Academy assured its subscribers that the cybercriminals did not obtain their debit/credit card information as a result of the data breach.

If you are one of the 800,000 students registered on the learning platform, you should change your password immediately to avoid the possibility of your personal information being used by hackers or sold to other parties.

In this context, you should pay more attention to phishing attempts and be extra cautious when reading emails or downloading attachments from unknown sources.

Furthermore, if you use the same password you used on New Skills Academys website on other sites, you should change your passwords on those sites as well preferably to a unique and complex password for each website.