The LA Times is reporting this morning that the UCLA system was hacked during the months of October and November, exposing the names, emails, and social security numbers of 800,000 current and former students.
A letter that is going to be sent out today to the victims from Chancellor Abrams states that there is no evidence of misuse of the social security numbers... so far.
"We take our responsibility to safeguard personal information very seriously. My primary concern is to make sure this does not happen again," Abrams said.
The security breach is being called the largest ones at a university ever. Even students who had applied but never enrolled at the university had their information exposed.
Technology experts at UCLA said they noticed suspicious activity when a string of specific queries came in high activity. They realized that these queries were part of an exploit hack that was aiming to fish out social security numbers.
The university is working on notifying the victims while the investigation is still continuing. UCLA has also created a page on its web site at identityalert.ucla.edu where people can see how they've been possibly effected, and they can also get information from a toll-free call center at (877) 533-8082.
Photo by D3BUG via Flickr
add to digg
add to stumble upon
add to reddit
email this
add to facebook
add to del.icio.us
What a wonderful little Christmas present this was...NOT!
We received the noticed this morning. My wife is an instructor at the UCLA Extension and her information was most likely compromised in this breach.
Worse still, she has spent several months cleaning up some other fraud that showed up on her report. Now we will have to be even more vigilant in watching those reports.
Yeech!
Douglas
October? That was October 2005, folks. The hacker was at it over a year!
Details here: http://www.identityalert.ucla.edu/alert_letter.htm