SEC Charges Pearson plc for Misleading Investors About Cyber Breach

The Securities and Exchange Commission today announced that Pearson plc, a London-based public company that provides educational publishing and other services to schools and universities, agreed to pay $1 million to settle charges that it misled investors about a 2018 cyber intrusion involving the theft of millions of student records, including dates of births and email addresses, and had inadequate disclosure controls and procedures. The SEC's order finds that Pearson made misleading statements and omissions about the 2018 data breach involving the theft of student data and administrator log-in credentials of 13,000 school, district and university customer accounts. In its semi-annual report, filed in July 2019, Pearson referred to a data privacy incident as a hypothetical risk, when, in fact, the 2018 cyber intrusion had already occurred.