Hack Exposes Lax Security in Academia

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January 17, 2005 (Computerworld) -- George Mason University said last week that information about more than 30,000 of its students and employees had been compromised, a disclosure that served as yet another reminder of the difficulty of securing university networks.

Officials at George Mason said unidentified hackers had breached the Fairfax, Va.-based school's main ID server and gained access to the names, photos and Social Security numbers of about 28,000 students and 4,000 staffers. The intrusion was discovered during a routine review of system files on Jan. 2 and may have occurred as far back as November, according to a spokesman for George Mason.

"It appears that the hackers were looking for access to other campus systems rather than specific data," Joy Hughes, the university's vice president of IT, wrote in an e-mail message to all of the people who were affected by the incident. "However, it is possible that the data on the server could be used for identity theft."

The breach at George Mason is the latest in a list of incidents involving academic institutions, including separate ones that took place last year at the University of California's campuses in Berkeley and Los Angeles.

In a survey of 501 colleges and universities conducted last fall by The Chronicle of Higher Education Inc. and Gartner Inc., 41% of the respondents said hackers had succeeded in penetrating their systems. Fifty-three percent reported denial-of-service attacks, and 14% reported unauthorized access to student data.

But there is a growing awareness of the potential cost and risk to reputation associated with lax security, and a better understanding of the broader threat that unsecured university networks can pose, said Rodney Petersen, a policy analyst at Educause, a Washington-based nonprofit association of 1,900 universities.

Educause has been working since July 2000 to foster a higher level of security awareness among academic institutions. The group has set up task forces that are creating guidelines designed to help universities locate and classify their IT assets, assess the risks those assets face and develop appropriate mitigation strategies, Petersen said.

"Higher-education institutions have come a long way," he said. "It's not like we're sitting passively and waiting for things to happen."

One school that's taking action is UCLA, which is making a broad attempt to change attitudes about IT security after last June's theft of a laptop containing personal information about 145,000 blood donors, said Kent Wada, the school's director of IT policy.

Increasing Awareness

For instance, UCLA has launched an awareness campaign to dissuade users from storing sensitive data on removable disk drives and Universal Serial Bus devices. It's also trying to encourage more encryption of stored data and is setting policies that prohibit users from downloading regulated data, such as health records, to personal systems that are connected to the school's network, Wada said.

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