Community College Servers Attacked by Hackers

2009-01-08

Two servers belonging to Lorain County Community College were hacked into during Thanksgiving break. Lisa Roberson, The Chronicle-Telegram, is reporting that while one of the servers contained the records of about 22,000 students, community users, and employees and included Social Security numbers - that the hacker did not target anyone's personal information. It is believed that the hacker actually wanted to pirate available server space.

Marcia Ballinger, vice president of strategic and institutional development, said "We believe from the computer forensic experts that no one's personal information was targeted. Still, the college believes firmly in being as aggressively precautionary as possible in not only notifying everyone involved, but also by contracting Equifax and making credit monitoring available for one year to anyone whose information was stored on that server."

She also added that this is a major concern for institutes of higher education, saying "Colleges and universities are targeted because we have strong, robust bandwidths. The capacity that a college or university has is greater than what businesses and individuals may have and - as a result - we are high targets. As much as IT professionals are trying to stay up-to-date with these types of crimes, cyber thieves are likewise trying to stay one step ahead of authorities."

While this is the first hacking incident to occur at Lorain County Community College, the Privacy Rights Clearinghouse has revealed that educational organizations have accounted for nearly one-third of all U.S data-breach incidents during the past three years.

The article also states that "About 58 percent of college IT officials nationwide have dealt with at least one computer-security incident in the past year while the increase in cyber attacks on college campuses has dramatically increased between 2006 and 2007 with 67.5 percent more incidences being reported in just one year."

You can read the entire article, here.