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It seems these days every week there is a new hack. The hackers not only target sites for less reputable companies and organizations, but rather they go for the big guns. Hackers have attacked the Michigan State University servers, in an attack which has seen them get access to a database that has more than 400,000 records and information related to the students both former and current. The database which had information stolen from also included information about the staff at the university.
The university confirmed the hack and they noted that it had taken place on November 13th. They also confirmed that the database in question and under attack was the one which contained the personal information such as the names of students, their social security numbers, and the MSU identification cards which were used by both the staff and employees at the university. The information was from way back in 1970 up to the current school year, which means that the cyber attackers managed to gain some reputable data from the MSU server.
The university also claims that there were no other personal details such passwords, financial, academic, contact or any health information stored on the server which had been hacked.
Apparently, out of the more than 400,000 records which were accessed by the hackers, they only managed to see 449 of them after which the university noticed the attack and promptly stopped it. They managed to take down the server, in less than 24 hours after noticing the breach.
In a statement, the university said that the MSU Information Technology team had managed to swiftly determine the cause and nature of the attack before they pushed on the situation to the police department of the university and to the federal agents so that they could get the hacking incident investigated. The statement also goes on to say that there was no evidence that the hackers had accessed all the accounts, but as a precautionary measure, the university was notifying all concerned members to offer some free credit monitoring.
The University also noted that the affected students and employees by the hack would most probably see some fraud activities associated with them in the near future so they had to keep an eye out for that. The evidence that a hack might have taken place appeared on October 28th, but it is so far unclear whether the hacker who was involved in that situation was the one who was involved in the November 13 hack, or if the situations are the same.
