UC Berkeley Health Service Data Stolen

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The breach went undiscovered for six months, during which time Social Security numbers and health insurance information were stolen.

By Thomas Claburn
InformationWeek
May 8, 2009 04:50 PM



For six months, hackers had access to a server at the University of California, Berkeley, and stole personal information associated with as many as 160,000 students, alumni, and parents.

In an uncommonly thorough disclosure, a UC Berkeley spokeswoman said that the data breach began on Oct. 9, and lasted through April 9, when university IT personnel found messages left by the hackers and took action to close the breach.


Andrew Conry-Murray spoke with the president of RSA, Art Coviello, at EMC (NYSE: EMC) World 2008 about Data Loss Prevention. The compromised server housed information from the UC Berkeley campus health services center and contained "Social Security numbers, health insurance information, and nontreatment medical information, such as immunization records and names of some of the physicians they may have seen ....

 

[vinylweatherman]

Link Removed


The breach went undiscovered for six months, during which time Social Security numbers and health insurance information were stolen.

By Thomas Claburn
InformationWeek
May 8, 2009 04:50 PM



For six months, hackers had access to a server at the University of California, Berkeley, and stole personal information associated with as many as 160,000 students, alumni, and parents.

In an uncommonly thorough disclosure, a UC Berkeley spokeswoman said that the data breach began on Oct. 9, and lasted through April 9, when university IT personnel found messages left by the hackers and took action to close the breach.


Andrew Conry-Murray spoke with the president of RSA, Art Coviello, at EMC (NYSE: EMC) World 2008 about Data Loss Prevention. The compromised server housed information from the UC Berkeley campus health services center and contained "Social Security numbers, health insurance information, and nontreatment medical information, such as immunization records and names of some of the physicians they may have seen ....

This implies that this could have gone on indefinitely if the hackers had NOT put these messages up, and MAY be going on undetected elsewhere.

It seems there are so many holes in the software used on servers connected to the internet that surely this is much more widespread than authorities believe. It is hackers that do this for "sport" that often blow the whistle on these vulnerabilities, I would expect a group of criminals would NOT leave messages, but would prefer to keep the exploit running for as long as possible for personal gain.