Personal information from 53
institutions worldwide made public
BY NICOLE PERLROTH
Hackers have published online
thousands of personal records from 53 universities around the world, including Harvard,
Stanford, Cornell, Princeton, Johns Hopkins and the University of Zurich.
THE GROUP OF HACKERS, CALLING
THEMSELVES Team GhostShell, claimed responsibility for the attack on Twitter,
and on Monday it published 36,000 e-mail addresses and thousands of names,
usernames, passwords, addresses and phone numbers of students and of faculty
and staff members, to the Web site Paste bin. In most cases, the data were
already publicly available, but in some instances the records included
additional sensitive information like students’ dates of birth and payroll
information from university employees.
Typically, hackers seek such
information because it can be use steal identities or crack bank accounts, or
because it can be sold on the black market. Universities make ripe targets
because they store vast numbers of personal records, often in decentralized
servers. The records can be gold mine because students often have pristine
credit reputations and do not monitor their account activity and credit scores
as vigilantly as adults do.