Erika Mellon reports: Houston school district officials suspect their computer system was hacked over the weekend, leaving employees and students without access to the Internet, online classes and e-mail for two days. The electronic blackout ended late Tuesday afternoon, but the district’s police department was continuing to work with the FBI to investigate the suspected…
Category: Education Sector
Tempering justice with mercy?
A number of people have commented on Twitter and on this blog that the young man who was arrested for breaching the Houston Healthcare database should have been thanked and/or hired. If this were 1983, I might agree with them, but I found myself taking a harder line about the breach as it was not…
Johns Hopkins University e-mail attachment error exposed personal info
Johns Hopkins University has notified the U.S. Dept. of Health & Human Services of a breach involving 692 of its Applied Physics Laboratory employees’ dependents. Because HHS’s breach logs don’t provide a lot of detail, I contacted JHU for additional information on the incident. As I have come to expect from them, they promptly responded with…
Thames Valley District hacker: “I did it to prove to people that their information isn’t as secure as they think”
Norman De Bono updates the story on the Thames Valley District hack: The board’s student portal was hacked, and Facebook quickly became rife with reports it was the work of a 16-year-old, Lucan-area student in Grade 11 at Medway high school in Arva. In Facebook message exchanges, someone purporting to be the youth said he…
Ca: Hacker wreaks havoc on Thames board website
Norman De Bono reports: A computer hacker breached security on the Thames Valley District school board’s website, meaning marks and timetables for 27,000 students – a small city of teenagers – could be accessed. The board has called in police and said the system was shut down “within an hour,” with no chance marks could…
Computer security at Tech questioned
Suzanne Barteau reports: A procedural mishap at New Mexico Tech’s Computer Center may have allowed the Social Security numbers of a few thousand people to be publicly available to anyone with a Tech computer account for nearly five years. William Colburn, Tech graduate, former Tech employee and Tech Community College instructor and current Tech student,…