Hack into Employee Data at UVA Announced

According to the management of UVA, a data-breach occurred at the institution during November 2014-February 2015. This was announced 22nd January, 2016. Immediately, the management began dispatching e-mails to each and every impacted employee. The University stated that the hackers were able to access 1,400 employees' W-2 tax forms. The forms related to two years -2013 and 2014. Besides, the hackers also stole 40 employees' records of deposits made directly to banks.

Chief Operations Office and Executive Vice-President of UVA Patrick Hogan said that the university bemoans the incident that caused the employees' personal information to be accessed; therefore, it had adopted measures for strengthening its systems for stopping such a thing to occur again. According to Hogan, it was the University's top priority that personal data and information remained secured while its IT professionals would keep on being watchful as also work towards improving its systems and infrastructure of IT security even more.

The data hack relied on one phishing campaign whereby the hackers dispatched fraudulent electronic mails to the university's employees directing that they should follow one given web-link followed with giving their passwords and A/C login details. It's possible that the stolen W-2 forms contained 'personally identifiable information' like social security numbers and home addresses. Meanwhile, UVA's IT department has requested members towards resetting by altering their original passwords. During 2014, the University enforced one automatic system wherein employees' passwords would become outdated every year. Softpedia reported this, January 23, 2016.

According to UVA, the latest data leakage represents a second intrusion into the school's IT systems during the last 6-months. During June, when the IT network was attacked, authorities suspected hackers from China as being responsible. However, there's little connection between this earlier event and the latest in discussion. The previous assault appeared as being part of many cyber assaults at a stretch vis-à-vis several US universities among which, UConn and Penn State are noteworthy.

UVA employees are suggested dialing the 1-855-907-3155 toll-free number to confirm whether their data got leaked in the latest breach. Moreover, a service for credit monitoring will be provided free-of-cost to every affected employee for one year.

» SPAMfighter News - 1/29/2016