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Another School Exposes Private Information
DutchSter writes "In the wake of other schools announcing the theft of hardware containing sensitive student information, Miami University, of Oxford, Ohio, has announced that a file containing the name, Social Security number, the grade point average for the Fall 2002 semester, cumulative grade point average, and other related academic information, such as credit hours attempted that semester, for all 21,000 students who attended the Fall 2002 term has been available on a web server for the last three years. The discovery was made this week and the university is taking steps to deal with the fall-out sure to come."
...and where do I send my resume ?
you think it's easy, but you're wrong...
I know this is a major breach of privacy/security, but I'm curious about what kinds of malicious things one could do with this information.
It seems to me that the only useful thing is the names/SSN combination.
Unless you could blackmail some poorly-achieving students by threatening to tell their parents their real marks?
"A week in the lab saves an hour in the library"
We were here first :P
No school needs an SSN. For that matter just say no to giving it to anybody but the IRS and your financial institutions. Your doctor doesn't need it. The gas company doesn't need it. Cingular and Earthlink don't need it.
The city in Florida sprung up at the end of the 1800s, and adopted the name because they thought it meant something vaguely pleasant regarding water.
So if anybody's ignorant, it's actually the clowns in Florida.
I got some inside information on the real story...
Apparantly there's this list of all the students academic info that's sent out to all the Deans each semester. One of the Deans gave it to another professor for whatever reason and that professor accidently puts it on a public drive and forgets about it for 3 years.
Nice. Real nice.
A lot of times it is not administrators who are directly doing this (i.e. its much bigger than one person or they have no real way of knowing). Information security is far more than simply one person's job. Everyone who has access to information - even the poor grad student who does backups on Sunday nights - should be responsible in some way for security.
It takes a lot of work to make strong, accountable policies and carefully define simple, but narrow ways of accessing information (i.e. not just dumping the student records excel file in the share folder). For example, everyone on campus has network access which is most often directly linked to online access. If one person screws up and misuses their data access priveleges by opening up information over the network, it is very hard to tell unless you have accountability in place. And how many places do security reviews?
When it becomes part of people's jobs to protect information, it will become a responsibilty. Right now, blaming one or two people is rarely a good solution. It's like someone who blames an outsourced medical transcripts worker in Pakistan for leaking information. Sure, it is there fault but the problem is much larger than one low-paid worker. Executive or peon, security is a group responsibility in information-rich, networked environments.
Before you start blaming every CS student maybe you should read the full explanation on their site, which among other things says:
"On Monday, September 12, 2005, Miami University became aware that a grade report from the Fall 2002 semester had been unwittingly placed by a now-retired faculty member into a file that was accessible via the Internet.
Note the 'retired faculty member'. Not a student or a hacker.
This seems like a common problem, how does one protect again appending sensitive information from a protected document into an ordinary text or non-sensitive file? Is there a technology out there that can mark the data so it can not be copied into another file even though it is accessible to some. Apparently the 'now retired faculty member' had access to the file. Probably used cut and paste to imbed it into a file he/she could access from home/laptop etc. We had lots of problems like this at government locations I worked at
I understand your anger but this does not seem to be a malicious act, it appears to be an honest screw up and is not like the stupidity of Citibank sending their files via un-encrypted tapes by UPS.
The school seems to be handling this OK.
It's named after the Miami tribe of Native Americans who used to live in the area. I go there, and yeah it's a joke. I'm just there because it's somewhere close while I decide where I want to really go. Wasn't always like that though, and to all the Miami Flordia people, Miami U was a school before Flordia was a state.
Peace
P.S.
yay, my first post!!
I don't care what youre doing so much as the idiotic way you're doing it.
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