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Data breaches in schools do not stop

Thursday, 14 December 2006

On Tuesday, the University of California declared that between October 2005 and November 2006 an unknown attacker got unauthorized access to the university-administered database containing personal details on about 800 thousand students, parents, teachers and employees.

The attack was stopped as soon as network administrators realized what was happening and on November 21st all the accesses to the database were blocked to prevent further intrusions.

The database included names, Social Security numbers, dates of birth, home addresses and contact information about the school's current students, faculty and staff, some former students and applicants as well as some parents of those students that applied for financial aid.

The University declared that the database didn’t include banking and credit-card information nor driver's license numbers.

Jim Davis, UCLA's chief information officer and associate vice chancellor for information technology, said that the intrusion was carried out through the exploitation of a small vulnerability. According to him, the University provided a complete review of the IT Security System and now the database has been reconstructed and properly protected.

This hasn’t been the first attack to a University by data thieves in the USA: in April the University of Texas warned students and staff that a database containing details of over 200 thousand people had been breached. And last week it was released that on November 16th crackers attacked the computer network at the Naval War College in Newport, taking down the school's network for more than two weeks, including some e-mail services and the college's Web site.

Many further cases have been denounced both in Europe and in the USA along 2006.

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