Confidential academic records from the Los Angeles private school Harvard-Westlake were “hacked and exposed,” according to the Hollywood Reporter. The cache of stolen information includes files from the last decade concerning roughly 150 alumni. As THR put it, this covers “children of Oscar winners, media chieftains, household names, assorted billionaires and influential political donors of both major political parties.”
The school, which is not affiliated with Harvard University, stretches back to the early 1900s when it was known as the Harvard School for Boys and the Westlake School for Girls. The two merged in 1991. Its famous alumni run the gamut from Dorothy Arzner to Dean Zanuck and include a number of celebrities such as Jamie Lee Curtis, Jason Segel, Candice Bergen, Billie Lourd, Beanie Feldstein, Ben Platt, Jason Reitman, and Maggie and Jake Gyllenhaal. Other notables include Myrna Loy, Shirley Temple, NASA astronaut Sally Ride, and J. Paul Getty.
Academic documents such as transcripts were sent to THR, which noted that the sender did not respond to follow-up questions. Harvard-Westlake’s president informed parents about the security breach in early September and said the FBI had been contacted. A perpetrator obtained a senior administrator’s username and password information, the school’s president later noted.
It is currently unknown if any other media outlets (outside of the school newspaper) received the documents.
Perhaps most troubling to the people involved is the leak of college recommendation letters that include “at times critical” assessments of students and “frank psychological portraits,” according to THR.
This all comes a few months after a different area elite school, the Center for Early Education, suffered a security breach where staff payroll information was emailed to the school community.
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