Viruses
cause CSU security breach
By
Cristina Madrid
Daily Forty-Niner
Contributing Writer
A computer from the California State University Office of the Chancellor was
attacked by a string of viruses planted by a suspected hacker that perhaps
allowed student names and Social Security numbers to be viewed, officials reported
Monday.
The computer, belonging to a CSU financial administrator who regularly works
with records filed under the financial aid program, was infected when the employee
was working from home on the network, said Colleen Bentley-Adler, a spokeswoman
for the CSU Office of the Chancellor.
The names and Social Security numbers of 154 individuals were included in the
files on the computer. Specifically, 152 of those individuals were receiving
financial aid, and the other two were financial aid administrators, according
to a report from the CSU’s Public Affair Department.
Although the names and numbers were compromised, Bentley-Adler said in a Long
Beach Press-Telegram interview, “There is no indication that any of their
personal data was accessed, but we have to take these matters seriously.”
Clara Potes-Fellow, another spokeswoman for the Office of the Chancellor, said
that of these numbers, none were Cal State Long Beach students.
The CSUs hit hardest by the attack were Chico, San Bernardino and San Marcos,
but one student from both CSU Pomona and CSU Sonoma were also a part of the
incident, Potes-Fellow said.
Once the situation was discovered, the CSU system sent letters to the individuals
as required by California Civil Code 1798.29, more commonly referred to as
SB 1386, the Public Affairs Department said in the report.
Furthermore, the CSU Chancellor’s Office has established a Web site,
www.calstate.edu/notice, that has information on the fraud-alert process, a
question-and-answer document, the letter sent to the individuals and various
identity theft resources.
Potes-Fellow advises students — whether or not they are connected with
this incident — to report to credit-reporting agencies and place a fraud
alert on their credit report in the event a student or anyone becomes a victim
of identity theft.
However, the CSU cannot guarantee the files compromised will not be accessed.
It is the students’ responsibility to contact their credit agencies and
to be vigilant.
The CSUs have measures students should use to protect their own files and systems
that contain personal information from unauthorized users.
They include having firewalls, changing passwords frequently, never sharing
passwords with other individuals, scanning systems regularly and updating antivirus
definitions.
The security breach came from an outside source between Aug. 8 and 15 and was
contained as soon as it was discovered, said Bentley-Adler. The type of virus
that infected the computer was a w32.spybot.worm.
According to Symantec Security Response, the worm is “a detection for
a family of worms that spreads using the Kazaa file-sharing network and mIRC.
This worm can also spread to computers that are compromised by common back-door
Trojan horses and on network shares protected by weak passwords.”
The Office of the Chancellor speculates that the computer was infected because
so may people have invested their time in figuring out its systems, and someone
may have found a vulnerability.
“We continuously upgrade our security systems and continue to“do
so. All campuses do the same thing,” Bentley-Adler said.
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