Identity Theft: UC Data Breach
Looks like the University of California has had another database breach, this time impacting nearly 800,000 current and former students, faculty and staff. Interestingly, it appears to the investigators that the Social Security Number (SSN) and other Personal Identity Information (PII) was specifically targeted in the breach.
CNN has an article on their site: “Hacker attack at UCLA affects 800,000 people“
I’m not quite sure how they were able to tell, but UC officials indicate that “there was no evidence any data (has) been misused”. An interesting statement, and completely untrue, as improper access is clearly misuse of the data in itself.
I’m really starting to suspect that this data is going into a fraudsters’ data warehouse somewhere . . . someone is systematically acquiring this data for some purpose that is yet to be realized by those of us on the good side.
Maybe we should start putting up marginally defended data systems containing real looking, but false data in order to pollute the fraudsters customer data collection attempts.
December 13th, 2006 at 9:36 am
It’s not the first, to be sure. I still wonder sometimes if my SS# was among those stolen in the UCSD break in back in 2001 or 02. (I can’t remember.)