UW-Parkside Struck by Data Breach Affecting 15,000 Students

Starttribune.com reported on 27th March, 2014 quoting the University of Wisconsin-Parkside as "personal data of 15,000 school-students may have been exposed cause of a cyber attack on the school's web server by a hacker".

Officials of University became aware of the situation on 16th March, 2014 when Services staff of the Campus Technology while executing routine maintenance discovered that computer hackers had installed a computer virus on one web server of the well-known University.

The information of students who gained admission in the school or who have attended UW-Parkside since 2010 might have been hijacked in the attack.

The server with the malware was immediately shut down.

The incident was reported to the local Police Station who launched an immediate probe into the unforeseen incident.

The University in the meantime, started an investigation with the help of an international computer security consultant to determine the source and extent of the security breach.

The malware did not indicate its source of origin or of those who masterminded the attack, investigators stressed.

Apparently, they found no evidence of identity theft by attackers and also have not found any proof of attempts of downloading names or SSNs (Social Security Numbers). However, investigators observed that crooks were trying to embezzle credit and debit card details but, that information was not available on the server.

University officials are notifying affected students so that they may take steps to protect their identity and monitor their financial transactions on their credit reports.

Wisn.com published a statement on 27th March, 2014 quoting John Scalia, a student of UW-Parkside, as that he is sure that the University is implementing some actions to make sure it doesn't happen again.

The University claimed that FBI (Federal Bureau of Investigation) is trying to track the hackers.

Wisn.com published news on 27th March, 2014 according to which Ilya Yakovlev, Chief Information Officer of the University said that the UW-Parkside takes security of all information particularly personal information of its students very seriously and the University believes that the chances of students data falling into wrong hands is pretty remote.

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