If you attend, attended, teach, or taught at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, you might want to give the ol’ alma mater a call: planted malware just exposed 75,000 student and staff SS numbers to prying eyes.
Whose prying eyes? It’s hard to say. The school suspects the target of the backdoor attack wasn’t social security numbers, but rather university research data—so this sounds like it could be an instance of academic espionage, rather than LulzSec-style data snatching. Research data isn’t the kind of stuff you’d throw up onto The Pirate Bay and wait for a frenzy—because really, almost nobody would care. Police are investigating the source of the attack—which went undetected for almost a week. I’ve got my eye on you, Princeton!
This also makes one wonder why social security numbers for former staff and students were being stored to begin with. Not cool. [JS Online via ZDNet]
