School Breach week 3

A data breach has happened at the vendor of Cal State called We End Violence. This is a vendor that is recommended by the White House. Students at eight California State University campuses had information such as their login names, course passwords, campus email addresses, gender, race, ethnicity, relationship status and sexual identity stolen when the Agent of Change website provided by vendor We End Violence was hacked (Derespina, 2015). There were about 80,000 students that were exposed in the hack. Students got lucky because no driver’s license numbers or social security numbers were stolen.

Once We End Violence found out about the hack they shut down their website two days after the incident. Any students that had their information stolen were alerted by the university. Cal State has given the students new usernames or login names and passwords. The vendor has contacted a third-party company about launching a forensic investigation.

This data breach could have been a lot worse than it was. Since the forensic investigation is still ongoing, there are no details as to why the hack happened. It is interesting to see that a third party vendor was hacked and not the actual college itself. Some data breaches occur this way. The hacker gets into the vendor’s system and pulls data from all their customers. So not only does the company have to be secure, but they have to make sure their vendors are secure as well. The university said, "Protecting student data and personal information is a top priority of the California State University (CSU)" (Eng, 2015).  It’s good to see that the university cares about the personal information of their students.

References

Derespina, C. (2015, September 11). Nearly 80,000 college students affected by data breach. Retrieved September 18, 2015, from http://www.foxnews.com/us/2015/09/11/nearly-80000-college-students-affected-by-data-breach/

Eng, J. (2015, September 10). Info on 79K Cal State Students Exposed in Hack of Third-Party Vendor. Retrieved September 18, 2015, from http://www.nbcnews.com/tech/security/info-79k-cal-state-students-exposed-hack-third-party-vendor-n425146