Penn State Deals With Latest Data Breach

From a data security standpoint, it been a miserable year for Penn State University.

As eSecurity Planet reports, the university is dealing with yet another serious data breach on campus after school officials confirmed that one its research computers was commandeered by a botnet for an unknown length time, potentially leaking the Social Security numbers and other sensitive data of 15,000-plus students.

Penn State has twice dealt with similar data breach incidents in the past 12 months as hackers and malware purveyors continue to target and prey on university and college networks and devices at an alarming rate.

Students and faculty members at Penn State suffered through a similar data security problem in December when the school was forced to notify some 30,000-plus students that a series of malware-induced data breaches at computers hosted at three different campus locations had exposed their personal information for an unknown period of time.


Penn State University is dealing with yet another data breach situation this week after school officials discovered that a university computer was essentially commandeered by a botnet and was revealing the names, Social Security numbers and other personal information of 15,800 students.

PSU officials said a PC in the campus’ Outreach Market Research and Data office was communicating with a botnet’s command-and-control center. The machine held a cached copy of Social Security numbers that were at one time housed in a database that was removed from the computer in 2005 when the university discontinued the use of SSNs as student identifiers.



Read the full story at eSecurity Planet:


Botnet Takes Control of Penn State Computer

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