Higher education struggling to contain data breaches this summer


Universities across the country have reported constant cyberattacks from Chinese IP addresses.

College students and their professors may be away from campuses, but news of data breaches big and small continue to make headlines at colleges nationwide, including a few during the last week of July.

From simple accidents that exposed thousands of students to cyberattacks to a barrage of hacking that has plagued higher education over the past year, universities are grappling with new and evolving challenges in protecting vitally important information about their students, alums, and faculty members.

In case you missed it, here’s a rundown of some of the worst data breaches in higher education over the past year, some of which were so massive that the exact number of people affected by the breaches remains unknown.

August, by the way, could prove to be a disastrous month for data security on college campuses, as many institutions send sensitive personal information over unencrypted eMail – a major security risk.

See below for briefs on some of the more notable campus data security breaches of the past month.

 

Personal data of 72,000 University of Delaware staff taken in hack: The University of Delaware (UD) has joined the long line of recent data breach victims, with a compromised university system yielding personal information on 72,000 past and present employees, Naked Security reports. UD authorities have notified those affected by mail, and email where possible. Investigators have been called in to pin down the scale of the breach, identify any additional risks and ensure those affected are properly informed.

Stanford University investigating security breach: Stanford University is investigating security breach of its information technology infrastructure, Patch reports. University administrators do not know how much data was comprised and are working with law enforcement officials and an information security consultant to determine that. “We are not aware at this time of any protected health information, personal financial information or Social Security numbers being compromised, and Stanford does not conduct classified research,” said Brad Hayward, University Communications spokesperson in a statement.

Oregon Health & Science University notifies patients of ‘cloud’ health information storage: OHSU is notifying 3,044 patients that their OHSU health information was stored on an internet-based eMail and/or document storage service, also known as a “cloud” computing system, according to the university. Although the internet-based service provider (Google Drive, Google Mail) is password-protected and has security measures and policies in place to protect information, it is not an OHSU business associate with a contractual agreement to use or store OHSU patient health information. There is no evidence that the data was accessed or used by anyone who did not have a legitimate patient care need to view the information.

 

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