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UT Austin Hit By Massive Security Breach

Posted by timothy on from the wonder-if-they-got-mine dept.

mrpuffypants writes "Reported in the Austin-American Statesman: The University of Texas' security was compromised over the weekend, leaking out nearly 60,000 records on students, staff, and faculty. Official word from the school can be found here. Most troubling of all is that, like most schools, UT still uses SSNs for student ID numbers, and that was part of the information taken from them in the attack."

2 of 508 comments (clear)

  1. It's not the IT department.. it's the provost by agrounds · · Score: 5, Informative

    I used to admin at a University. One of the most frustrating things I encountered was the incessant desire for there to be no restrictions on any of the computing systems that the students used. This includes the servers. The firewall was just an expensive router. We were not allowed to run blocks from the internet to inside IPs, as that defeated the spirit of free access. I tried to explain why it was a 'Bad Thing(tm)' repeatedly, but alway met with resistance from the shared governance committee. One cannot blame the administrators in this thing. I assure you they feel just as powerless as I did. This kind of thing will become more and more rampant as clueless faculty (or upper-management in the business world) are allowed to influence major IT decision-making.

  2. SSN at UT by yar · · Score: 5, Informative

    I have both attended at work at UT in IT, so I can give you my observations.

    For many years, UT had a non-centralized IT infrastructure. That is, the Colleges did one thing, the Administrative Computing Group did another thing, the Academic Computing Group did yet another thing, and the Libraries something else entirely. This was recently changed with the introduction of a new Office of Information Technology head by a new Vice Provost (Dan Updegrove, originally at Yale). One of the very first things I heard him address was the Social Security number problem in which every student, faculty, and staff member used their SSN as their ID. That practice had to change in order to meet both legal and privacy standards (see FERPA) , and UT has been trying for the past couple of years to make that happen. The trouble is, it was so integrated into all of the different services and departments that it is a slow process to remove it. They started to phase it out, but now UT is seeing the effects of this particular practice. I'm likely one of the ones who will be affected, so I'm waiting for them to announce where people can find that out. (It may be at the UT site, http://www.utexas.edu/datatheft/.

    The Daily Texan (student newspaper) has an article about the theft, as does the Houston Chronicle.)

    By the way, your Social Security Number isn't public information. It is required for use by some agencies of the government, but you are not required to provide your SSN to private groups unless they need to interact with certain government agencies (this includes your employers, who deal with the IRS). That being said, SSNs are so commonly used a search may pull up that information- but that doesn't mean it is legally public info.