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."
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?
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.
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.
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
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!