Drugs, under age drinking, failing classes, and now identity theft? Most of these are problems that parents of college students have had to worry about for some time. But now, with more and more personal data involved with the education process being placed online, a new risk has emerged. Recently, at the University of Missouri, an information system that contained private information about students and researchers was hacked. In all, over 22,000 individuals were put at risk.

While details are still developing about the incident, it appears that the perpetrator was working from computers in China and Australia. No one has officially been charged with the crime. Apparently the hacker was able to access the information through an internet query page that was used to generate reports about computer trouble on campus. Perhaps the hacker had a sense of humor when conducting his illegal activities. The files were compiled on the site because the university was taking an account of the number of internal computer issues affecting students and staff. Even though at the time of the data breach the report had already been printed, it had not been removed from the site. This is an unfortunate example of a data breach that was easily preventable.

Incidences like this only further show the susceptibility of current sites of personal data. Ever since the attack was reported, university officials have taken steps to increase the security of their network. While information is still coming in about the event, officials have said they will contact the affected individuals. In the mean time, staff and students should monitor their credit reports, bank accounts, and consider purchasing an ID theft security system, such as Lifelock. The university hopes to alert everyone in a timely fashion as they get more details about the data breach.

While the University of Missouri works to fix this most recent attack on their system, some members of the wider-university community have expressed skepticism about the safety of the network. This most recent incident comes only four months after another part of the university’s private data system was infiltrated. In that separate attack, the social security numbers of 1,220 university researchers were stolen, as were the passwords of over 2,500 grant applicants.

There has been no mention of individually contacting the individuals involved in the January attack. As a result, members of the university’s research community, as well as those people who applied for grants recently, need to pay extra attention to their personal accounts. The two failings of security measures the university has in place in such a short period of time has some worried about the wide-spread implications of these attacks and the possibility of future problems. It also raises the importance of having different passwords for different accounts, be they email, database, or individual files.

Tags: lifelock, mizzu, university of missouri

This entry was posted on Thursday, May 29th, 2008 at 12:53 am and is filed under Individuals, School Breaches. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.