21st Century Learning and Teaching

Iowa State University has revealed yesterday that five of its departmental servers on campus have been hacked, and that Social Security numbers of nearly 30,000 of its past and present students might have been stolen.

The good news is that while that data was contained on three of the compromised servers, there is no evidence that it has actually been accesses and/or exfiltrated.

The University's IT staff believes that the servers were targeted not for the information they contained, but for their computing power - the attackers have apparently been using them to mine Bitcoins.

Hackers accessed the credit card information of tens of thousands customers of the University of Michigans Union Ticket Office, the latest organization that has fallen victim to a breach affecting a thirdparty vendor.

Hackers accessed the credit card information of tens of thousands customers of the University of Michigan's Union Ticket Office, the latest organization that has fallen victim to a breach affecting a third-party vendor.

How many victims? More than 33,000.

What type of personal information? Names, street addresses, email addresses, phone numbers, credit card numbers and expiration dates. 

What happened? 

The database supplied by third-party ticketing solution provider Vendini was compromised by hackers who may have stolen the personal information of any U of M customer in the last two years.

What was the response? University officials have contacted all individuals affected by the breach.

Details: How the hackers were able to compromise the Vendini systems is currently unknown. According toa statement released by the company, the stolen information does not include credit card security access codes, account user names or passwords.

Summary: The hacktivist group behind Project Hellfire claims to have leaked records from 100 of the top universities around the world.

Read more:

http://www.zdnet.com/ghostshell-leaks-120000-records-from-top-100-universities-7000005118/

A team of hackers claims to have broken into more than 120,000 computer accounts at dozens of universities to protest what it sees as the high cost and low quality of higher education.

The group, called “Team GhostShell,” claimed responsibility on Monday for the computer attacks in a post to an online bulletin board.

The post listed the universities that were the group’s targets, including Harvard University and the Universities of Cambridge and Tokyo.

Read more:

http://chronicle.com/blogs/wiredcampus/hacker-group-breaches-thousands-of-university-records-to-protest-higher-education/40348