http://www.koco.com/news/16267153/detail.html
KOCO.com
May 14, 2008
STILLWATER, Okla. -- Personal information belonging to anybody who got a
parking pass at Oklahoma State University over the last five years has
been compromised, university officials said Wednesday.
OSU is working with the FBI to investigate how one of the university's
servers was hacked.
As many as 70,000 current and former OSU faculty, students and staff are
affected because their names, addresses and Social Security numbers were
on the server. University officials issued a security alert on
Wednesday, detailing what happened and how OSU reacted. In part, the
alert read:
Upon discovering this intrusion, the IT Information Security Office
immediately removed the server from the network to evaluate server
activity to ascertain if personal information had been accessed. The
confidential information has been removed from the database. The
illegal access was limited to the parking and transit server.
"This breakdown in security is totally unacceptable," said OSU President
Burns Hargis. "We are conducting a full review and will take steps to
protect our network from unauthorized access."
Investigators believe the hacker accessed OSU's server from Germany.
Experts told Eyewitness News 5 that the most common motivation for a
hacker to access a university's server is to use it to upload
inappropriate material, not to steal personal information. Universities
are common targets for hackers because they typically utilize large
servers.
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