Personal information from students in 39 Texas school districts was likely exposed in a data breach involving a Texas Department of Agriculture employee's laptop.

The state-issued laptop was attacked by ransomware on Oct. 26, according to a Nov. 22 security notification from the agriculture department. The breach is said to have exposed Social Security numbers, home addresses, birth dates and personal phone numbers of students and their families.

The department, which oversees the federal nutrition program that provides school breakfasts and lunches, has identified more than 700 students whose personal information was likely leaked as a result of the attack. The Ennis, Melissa and Princeton school districts and the Dallas County Juvenile Department are among the Dallas-area entities affected.

The Denton Record-Chronicle reports some districts said they had not been notified at all about the breach.

"I've been doing this a long time and this is pretty peculiar," Ponder ISD Superintendent Bruce Yeager told the Record-Chronicle. "What's unusual is the way [the Texas Department of Agriculture] posted the notification and you had to go out and find it. The Department of Agriculture had this breach, and it's kind of rolled back on us to figure out."

Mark Loeffler, communications director for the TDA, said all affected districts were notified, though some email notifications have gone into spam or trash folders.

"We found the malware and caught it early," Loeffler said. "And that's the good news."

Loeffler said releasing the security notification is "entirely precautionary," and that there is no evidence that leaked information has been misused. He added that he could not release many details about the malware attack because "the one thing we don't want to do is help anybody that is trying to attack our system again."

He would say that information on the laptop was "more subject to that malware than it should have been."

"It's something that people all over the world are being affected by every day, and as a government agency we are surely not immune to such attacks," Loeffler said.

Data breaches have made headlines across the country this year, including one involving Equifax, in which an estimated 143 million Americans' sensitive personal information was compromised this summer. Malware was also used in that case.

Loeffler said anyone with questions can reach out to the agriculture department for more information. The department recommends that affected students and their families contact three major credit bureaus, Equifax, TransUnion and Experian, and activate fraud alerts or security freezes to combat potential fraud.

The Dallas Morning News' Watchdog columnist, Dave Lieber, wrote in September about how to protect against data breaches. Included in his warnings: "Assume your information is stolen. Let's work from there."

The full list of the school districts affected by the breach:

Alba-Golden ISD

Alvarado ISD

Argyle ISD

Big Sandy-Dallardsville

Boles ISD

Boyd ISD

Central ISD

Cleburne ISD

Corsicana ISD

Crowley ISD

Dallas County Juvenile Department

Ennis ISD

Etoile ISD

Gilmer ISD

Gladewater ISD

Gunter ISD

Harleton ISD

Harrison County Juvenile Services

Jean Massieu Academy

Karnack ISD

Keene ISD

Kennedale ISD

Krum ISD

Lake Dallas ISD

Melissa ISD

Neches ISD

New Diana ISD

Ore City ISD

Paradise ISD

Pilot Point ISD

Pineywoods Community Academy

Ponder ISD

Princeton ISD

Slidell ISD

St. Mary of Carmel School

St. George School

Terrell ISD

Union Grove ISD

Union Hill ISD