School software breach and 23andMe’s $6M settlement: How to protect your family today

You sent your kid to school. You spit in a tube to find out if you’re 12% Irish. Totally normal stuff.

Now, companies you trusted have lost the most personal parts of your family.

🎒 The school breach in your mailbox

Frontline Education, a software company that serves K-12 schools, recently started mailing breach letters. Someone got into its systems Aug. 14 and 15.

The exposed data reads like a full identity kit: Social Security numbers, birth dates, driver’s license and passport numbers, Medicaid IDs and student IDs.

Here’s the tell. Frontline is offering adults two years of free credit monitoring and minors their own monitoring. Translation: Kids are in the pile. (Frontline hasn’t said how many people were affected.)

A child’s Social Security number is gold to a crook. Nobody checks a 9-year-old’s credit, so fraud can run for years before anyone notices.

🧬 Your DNA has no reset button

California’s attorney general announced a $6 million settlement with the company formerly known as 23andMe over its 2023 breach, which hit nearly 7 million Americans. (It still needs a judge’s OK.)

The twist: 23andMe went bankrupt and sold customers’ genetic data and spit samples to a nonprofit started by its own cofounder.

You can cancel a stolen credit card in five minutes. You can’t cancel your genome. And your DNA is your kids’ DNA, too.

Do this today:

• Got a Frontline letter? Sign up for the free monitoring, for you and your kids. Questions go to 1-800-759-7279.
• Freeze your credit at Equifax, Experian, TransUnion and Innovis. It’s free. You can freeze your kids’ credit, too, even if they’ve never had a card.
• Used 23andMe? Log in and go to Settings > 23andMe Data > View. Download your data if you want it, then click Permanently Delete Data and confirm through the email they send.
• Get your spit sample destroyed under Settings > Preferences. Pull research permission under Research and Product Consents.
• Tell your parents and siblings. Their DNA tells on you. (Seriously.)

You can’t un-ring this bell, but you can lock the doors.

🛡️ Shrink the pile 

Here’s what you need to know: Stolen Social Security numbers get a lot more dangerous when crooks can match them to your address, phone number and relatives. Data brokers and people-search sites sell that info to just about anyone who pays.

That’s where Incogni comes in. Here’s what it does for you:

• Finds the data brokers and people-search sites holding your info
• Sends removal requests to them on your behalf
• Follows up when they drag their feet
• Keeps sending requests on a schedule, because your info has a nasty habit of coming back
• Tracks every request in a dashboard, so you can see it working

I’ve used it since October 2023. I tested this myself, and here’s my dashboard.

Incogni

Incogni has sent 3,187 removal requests for me, 2,979 of which are done, 208 are in progress. And 160 more are scheduled.

Time saved: 2,234 hours. That’s 93 days of nonstop opt-out forms I didn’t fill out.

My privacy score is 80 out of 100. Without Incogni, it would be 36.

No phone calls. No forms. No weekend lost to opt-out pages.

✅ Get 60% off Incogni with code KIM60. Lock it down before the next breach letter shows up.

📩 Send this to someone who has kids in school and did a DNA kit “just for fun.”