Hackers hit Harvard

By aodle56 at 10:43 pm on March 15, 2008 | 1 Comment

It was recently announced that last February at least one hacker was able to gain access on one server at Harvard University potentially viewing private information on up to 10,000 grad students and applicants of the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences.

Server administrators noticed the attack and immediately shut down the particular server for five days in order to minimize the effects. But according to sources, a substantial amount of the information stolen was recently leaked on the popular bittorrent site, The Pirate Bay. This information includes names, addresses, school ID numbers, and housing information. Apparently social security numbers were also compromised however they were not posted publicly on the bittorrent site.

There was no mention of the school having any leads as to who the attackers were. Right now they are focusing mostly on the cleanup, which includes notifying the entire student body that their private information may have been leaked and offering free credit monitoring as to prevent identity theft.

After taking this class I never really thought my information was that safe anyway, but it’s still a little unnerving to think that the information our school has about us (which is a lot) could probably be accessed.

Source: http://abcnews.go.com/Technology/story?id=4451076&page=1

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    Comment by imv

    March 16, 2008 @ 7:42 pm

    Perhaps schools could/should have a policy of deleting all sensitive information about students after some period of time – things like SSN and bank account information. Obviously they still need address/contact-info to hit up graduates for money, and transcript must be maintained, so there’s only so much the school can do to minimize the hacker’s reward.

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