Confidential records breached at Fla. college

Computer hackers broke into a Florida college’s computer system and stole the confidential information of nearly 300,000 students statewide and the school’s president, officials said Wednesday, the Associated Press reports. The problem that at first involved just employees at Northwest Florida State College now is much larger than suspected. The Department of Education said hackers stole 200,000 records including names, Social Security numbers, birthdates, ethnicity and gender for any student statewide who was eligible for Florida’s popular Bright Futures scholarships for the 2005-06 and 2006-07 school years.

“We speculate this was a professional, coordinated attack by one or more hackers,” said college President Ty Handy in a memo that went out to employees on Monday. Handy said the hackers did not get all the information from one file, but instead were able to piece together enough data to steal identities of at least 50 employees including his own…

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Not getting the (text) message

Forty percent of campuses encourage students to sign up for alerts during orientation.
Forty percent of campuses encourage students to sign up for alerts during orientation.

It is a typical morning on campus, with students heading to class and professors and staff arriving for work, when suddenly there is an emergency. It could be a flood, a gas leak, or an intruder on campus. How quickly can the campus notify the community? How many people can the campus reach in those critical minutes immediately following an emergency?

Traditional methods of mass notification, such as sirens, television, and radio, only provide critical information to the community in a timely manner if they tune in. And, in the event of a power outage, those methods might not be available at all.

In recent years, higher-education institutions have been forced to re-evaluate emergency response systems, including mass-notification solutions. Many institutions have added eMail and text messaging to their mass-communication methods roster, which works well with today’s generation of college students, who already rely heavily on cell phones and text messages.…Read More

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