Slashdot Mirror

The article mentions a university network, not a college network. Universities are typically made up of several colleges, like the college of pharmacy or college of business.

This article contains a story about an unspecified university, a story that was basically summarized from Verizon's Data Breach Digest 2017. Actually, the 2017 digest isn't out yet and this story is from a "sneak peak".

Depends, is it your personal account that isn't related to any organization? Then the least of risk is your account being used for spam. That's your best case scenario.

Quite often personal email accounts are tied as the password recovery to access secondary systems like banking passwords? Would you like your forgotten bank account password reset and a new one emailed to you? If you're lazy enough to use a common password chances are you reused that same password on other systems you have access to.

If it's your work account now I have access to a trusted account that can be used for fraud. Perhaps you work with sensitive data, or data that can be readily taken out of context? Perhaps your access can be used to embarrass your organization? It can also be used to identify spear fishing opportunities. It can be exploited to help gain access into your organization's network.

These aren't hypotheticals, these situations occur every single day. They are a leading cause of data breaches, and the same damn Pa$$w0rd set keeps showing up year after year. Frankly the only surprising thing will be if other major organizations don't follow by also banning very weak passwords.

Some reading on why this matters: http://www.verizonenterprise.c...

Of the types of Cyber attacks motives -- Activist led, state sponsored espionage and ones driven by criminal activity, activist is a tiny fraction compared to the other two.
http://www.verizonenterprise.com/resources/reports/es_data-breach-investigations-report-2013_en_xg.pdf
Also of the three types, activist attacks are the least sophisticated while state espionage attacks are the most sophisticated. Its funny how activist attacks are considered as "terror" attacks.
Yes there will be attacks because of Snowden, but they will be insignificant compared to the daily business of government led attacks