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Posts Tagged ‘Federal Bureau of Investigation’

Massive Data Breach at Hawaiian University

November 8th, 2010

: Image via Wikipedia

Educational universities have been struggling with their data security norms and have failed to keep the confidential students data secure. A new case which highlights this fact is the huge data breach incident at Hawaiian University, which in-fact is the 2nd time such a case has happened in the university for the 2nd time this year. At stake is the most sensitive personal information of the students and alumni.

The affected alumni who are being notified this week include those who attended UH’s Manoa campus from 1990 through 1998 and during 2001 and students who attended the UH West Oahu campus during the fall of 1994 or graduated between 1988 and 1993. The hackers had managed to penetrate the server at Manoa campus. The attack exposed the names, social security number, driving licenses and social security numbers of around 53,000 students, employees and faculty members.

This time around last year, a similar case had happened when the details of 4500 students were officially posted on the website of the school. These details included names, social security numbers etc.

On their side, University of Hawaii officials have mentioned that case was reported to the FBI & Honolulu Police Department. As a matter of precaution the un-secured server was also disconnected by the officials to prevent further losses. In addition all the impacted alumni have been sent email notices. Email notices were also sent last week to impacted alumni mentioning that the university “has no evidence that anyone’s personal information was accessed for malicious intent.”

According to the Titus of Liberty Coalition similar breaches have been discovered in other universities across the United States. The notable ones include personal information of over 250,000 individuals which was held by a Florida state employment office.

At the moment it is difficult to track the level of misuse of this information.

University spokeswoman Tina Shelton said, “The university system is NOT aware of any actual security breaches raised by the inadvertent exposure by the UH West Oahu professor.”

Naturally the students are disturbed by the security breach and graduate Paul Philpott is one of them. He is one of the alums whose personal information was exposed and has spoken to other friends and classmates as well.

Philpott said in an email, “None of us have given any authority to any person or institution to have our identities used, put on the Internet, or to be used in a study on us”. “For those affected that I have talked with, explanations and help should be immediate and detailed”.

The Titus of Liberty Coalition mentioned in a telephone interview. “It’s my impression that the University of Hawaii is a few years behind in its IT (information technology) security,”

He also added, “This could have been prevented if the university had a policy of scanning its IT system for records containing personal information like social security numbers,” he says, adding software programs and information technology experts are available to perform such searches.

All the potentially affected students can call (808) 956-6000 during weekday business hours or check the website at http://www.uhwo.hawaii.edu/idalert

How Alertsec Xpress Would Have Helped

In an incident which highlights the need of a data security and recovery software.The threat could have simply be reduced to an insurance matter by a mere investment of $13/month. The information would have been secure with no loss what so ever. That is certainly a small price to pay compared to what can happen if you lose confidential or sensitive data. Alertsec Xpress offers a very good and easy-to-use laptop security service that includes more than the traditional software licensing model. Feel free to subscribe for your personal 30-day free trial.

Key findings from the Computer Theft survey

August 6th, 2010

: Image via Wikipedia

The main concern while running a business is keeping your computing devices like desktops, laptops etc. and their data secure. The portability offered by laptops, increases their chance of being stolen as people are constantly leaving them unattended at public places. Many a times these devices are left behind at restaurants, subways, coffee shops, airports etc. Although the insurance company may cover the hardware, the files and data on the machine may eventually be untraceable and forever lost.

Recently BSI carried out their 8^th Annual Computer Theft Survey in the United States. Here are the key findings from that survey:

More than 5.5 Million computers were stolen in the United States in the last 3 years.
More than half (58.7%) of the respondents have been a victim of computer theft in the last year.
According to FBI, 97% of unprotected computers (i.e. computers that do not use any data encryption software or computer security software) are never recovered.
68% of the devices stolen were laptops, followed by desktops (10%) & others like PDA’s, iphone etc. (22%)
67% of computer theft occurred while respondent was mobile (moving about),
91% of respondents did not use data encryption software to encrypt the proprietary data on their stolen device.
Average total replacement cost of each stolen computing device was $43,264.66.
71% of respondents reported downtime due to computer theft ranging from several days to more than a month.
Only 21% of those surveyed used extensive data protection like dedicated data encryption software, but about 70% did not use any safeguard or security protection at all.

These numbers are very similar to the numbers in the surveys done earlier on this issue, clearly indicating that people are not doing anything more to protect their data than they were doing earlier.

If you carefully analyze the survey data, you will notice that only 3% of stolen computing devices are recovered; even then only 9% people are using data encryption software to protect their data.

Encrypt your Data for peace of mind!

We spend huge sums to protect our internal networks, but forget that there are people carrying laptops that are connected to these internal networks. These laptops are equally vulnerable to theft & hacking. This fact has been highlighted in the survey, according to which 67% of computer thefts occurred when the respondent was outdoors.

By using laptop encryption software, we could have greatly enhanced the laptop security as there is no way that the information is compromised if the laptop is lost or stolen. A theft would simply be reduced to an insurance matter and cost of the hardware plus time to rebuild the laptop.

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