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."

Comments

Re:wow!

[atrizzah]

My name was on the list. Hooray!

I was just about to submit this story myself. Here's UCLA's official website devoted to the whole incident: Link

I wonder, will there be a point in time when we hold accountable either the credit agencies for their broken system or organizations we are forced to trust with our data for not keeping it safe?

It's time to make the SSN database public

[MightyYar]

If the SSN database were public, the SSN would cease to become such a valuable target for identity thieves - systems would have to be changed to account for the public nature of the information. The SSN is fine as a unique identifier, but it should never have become a security tool.

Re:wow!

[pilgrim23]

There is only one possible way to protect yourselves these days: Lie. If someone needs your info, or SAYS they need your info ("I am sorry sir but our regulations clearly state you must fill out this form") then lie, fib, tell an untruth! For years I have always typoed a number or two on my SSN on forms, mis-spelled my name, screwed up the address, etc. I never commit outright fraud, but I DO use tecnhiques that will screw up their database. If more of us just smiled shrugged and said "oh well" to these data leeches in this simple manner, the problem would go away due to the general unreliability of the database,