- Joined
- Apr 8, 2005
- Messages
- 8,011
- Reaction score
- 58
Hacker attack at UCLA affects 800,000 people
Story
LOS ANGELES, California (AP) -- The University of California, Los Angeles alerted about 800,000 current and former students, faculty and staff on Tuesday that their names and certain personal information were exposed after a hacker broke into a campus computer system.
Only a small percentage -- "far less than 5 percent" -- of the records in the database were actually accessed, UCLA spokesman Jim Davis told The Associated Press.
Still, it was one of the largest such breaches involving a U.S. higher education institution.
The attacks in October 2005 and ended November 21 of this year, when computer security technicians noticed suspicious database queries, according to a statement posted on a school Web site set up to answer questions about the theft.
Davis said the hacker used a program designed to exploit an undetected software flaw to bypass security and get into the restricted database, which has information on current and former students, faculty and staff, and some student applicants and parents of students or applicants who applied for financial aid.
Many of the records in the database do not link names and Social Security numbers, however, the two pieces of information the hacker was after, Davis said.
Story
LOS ANGELES, California (AP) -- The University of California, Los Angeles alerted about 800,000 current and former students, faculty and staff on Tuesday that their names and certain personal information were exposed after a hacker broke into a campus computer system.
Only a small percentage -- "far less than 5 percent" -- of the records in the database were actually accessed, UCLA spokesman Jim Davis told The Associated Press.
Still, it was one of the largest such breaches involving a U.S. higher education institution.
The attacks in October 2005 and ended November 21 of this year, when computer security technicians noticed suspicious database queries, according to a statement posted on a school Web site set up to answer questions about the theft.
Davis said the hacker used a program designed to exploit an undetected software flaw to bypass security and get into the restricted database, which has information on current and former students, faculty and staff, and some student applicants and parents of students or applicants who applied for financial aid.
Many of the records in the database do not link names and Social Security numbers, however, the two pieces of information the hacker was after, Davis said.
