No good news ever begins this way: We are writing to inform you of a data security-related incident that may have involved your personal information. On March 9, 2015, Information Technology (IT) staff in the School of Engineering detected that malicious software, or “malware,” had been placed on a number of servers that are part…
Category: Education Sector
University of Calgary paid $20K in ransomware attack on faculty and staff email
CBC News reports: The University of Calgary paid a demanded $20,000 after a “ransomware” cyberattack on its computer systems. The university announced the ransom payment Tuesday, a week after the initial attack. “As part of efforts to maintain all options to address these systems issues, the university has paid a ransom totalling about $20,000 Cdn that was…
Defunct undergrad law society site exposed hundreds of SSNs
Penn State University recently reported an incident to the New Hampshire Attorney General’s Office that involves a now-defunct club. According to their report, the university was notified on April 13 that a historical document uploaded to the Undergraduate Law Society‘s web site was a spreadsheet that contained two fields – SSN and DOB – that…
WA: Northshore School District students receive emails with inappropriate messages
Janet Kim reports: The Northshore School District is updating parents that student’s emails were not hacked, instead were spammed after first warning parents that an outsider gained access to student emails. Now students are locked out of their emails with just weeks left in the school year, as the district investigates this serious security breach….
NY: Holley Central School District investigates possible hacking
WHAM reports: The Holley Central School District Superintendent Robert D’ Angelo tells 13WHAM a server containing past and present staff data has been hacked. “As soon as we learned of this, the portal through which the hack may have been made was shut down and additional measures were taken to reduce the possibility of further…
Rostering, Provisioning, Owning Your Stack, and Transparency: a Look at Lewis Palmer
The Lewis Palmer School District data security vulnerability and breach continues to concern parents, and I had updated my original post with some observations by Bill Fitzgerald. Now Bill has written his own post on the situation. Giving myself unbridled permission to quote liberally from his thoughtful write-up, here’s part of it: At the 5/19 school…