A number of universities around the world were recently hit with hacking attacks that led to
data breaches involving students and faculty members alike.
The University of Pennsylvania recently confirmed it had been hit in the attack, perpetrated by the hacking collective Team GhostShell, according to a report from the
Philadelphia Inquirer. The group said it carried out the attacks on a number of schools because it has a fundamental disagreement with the way in which they are now allowing students to accrue education debt.
Penn acknowledged there was some data exposed, but that the effects were limited, the report said.
"Fortunately, no sensitive information that could result in identify theft, such as Social Security numbers, PennKey passwords, bank account numbers, or credit card numbers are contained in the database that was compromised," the school told the newspaper via email.
Ondrej Krehel, the chief information security officer for
Identity Theft 911, writes regularly on his blog about the ways in which hackers can endanger consumers' sensitive, personally identifying data.
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