Slashdot Mirror
UCLA Hacked, 800,000 Identities Exposed
An anonymous reader writes "The Washington Post reports that a central campus database at UCLA containing the personal information (including SSNs) of about 800,000 UCLA affiliates has been compromised for possibly over a year. The data may have been available to hackers since October 2005 until November 21, 2006, when the breach was finally detected and blocked. Several other UC campuses have also been involved in significant data security incidents over the past few years." From the article: "'To my knowledge, it's absolutely one of the largest,' Rodney Petersen, security task force coordinator for Educause, a nonprofit higher education association, told the Los Angeles Times. Petersen said that in a Educause survey release in October, about a quarter of 400 colleges said that over the previous 12 months, they had experienced a security incident in which confidential information was compromised, the newspaper reported."
Security is hard to get right because you have to get *everything* right.
Make one mistake and you've got no security.
As such, it is problematic to have vast databases of highly valuable information protected by "security".
The result will be a constant flow of database violations.
Unfortunately, by and large, the a database provides a large and ongoing bureaucratic benefit to an organisation, whereas the pain of data loss is primarily born by the people described by the database.
The only response we have as individuals is to keep our details as secret as possible.
The SSN was never to be used as a identifier. PERIOD. It was only to be used for the Social Security System. It was banks and credit bureaus who made the SSN a identifier. The issue that the banks and credit bureaus confronted so many years ago was that they needed a unique way of identifying you for purposes of granting credit. The SSN was the only option as it was desgined from the get go to give you a unique number. Even now though, older SSN's are being reissued as people die off. The problem now is that the number is shown being used by a dead person.
Unfortunately, there's no easy answer. SSN's already in use as an id and until something else better comes along, we have to use it. So what should we in IT do? First, reduce easy access to the number. When designing systems, issue a id that is unique and ONLY works with your system. If you need a way of identifying people in the real world, file the SSN and then reduce access to it. Only let the people who need that number have access to it. In the case of colleges, only financial aid and possibly select people records and registration need to see it. Everyone else MUST use the institution specific id.
The big issue for some higher ed systems is that they used some unsecure methods for far too long. One system in particular up until about 2-3 years ago was using telnet in their client! It was not even SSL'd!
Gorkman
Correction.
11 people are going to be pissed as shit.
34 people are going to panic.
72 people are going to wonder if the story is relevant to them.
284 people aren't going to realise the story is relevant to them.
799599 people affected aren't even going to hear about this, let alone care.
There is a silent majority. It's silent because its too apathetic to speak.
May the Maths Be with you!