Thursday, March 17, 2005

Incident: Boston College alumni database breached

Not only another one to add to the incident list (PIPEDA and Canadian Privacy Law: Summaries of incidents cataloged on PIPEDA and Canadian Privacy Law), but yet another university incident:

Boston College reveals alumni data breach | Tech News on ZDNet: "Boston College is fighting against an attack on its fund-raising databases, which may have exposed the personal data of more than 100,000 alumni.

College representatives said Thursday that the school was the target of a virus attack on a computer housed in a campus calling center used by students to solicit donations from alumni. According to Boston College spokesman Jack Dunn, the machine in question is managed by a third-party IT service, which the school has chosen not to publicly identify.

Dunn said the company noticed a spike in the computer's activity during a routine maintenance operation and discovered a virus on the device that was attempting to use the database to launch attacks on other systems. The machine was then taken offline and examined in order to determine the extent of the attack.

No other computers were found to be affected by the virus, he said...."

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