Over the past 2 years Penn State University's College of Engineering has been the victim of at least 2 substantial cyber attacks. The most recent yielded the cyber attackers 18K usernames and passwords for various people affiliated with the college.
They hired an independent cyber security firm to investigate and they have confirmed that at least one of the attacks came from China. Most of these attacks are from highly organized, skilled, and well funded individuals. The college was first alerted of the attacks by the FBI in 2014.
The article also mentions that many colleges universities are targets of cyber attacks that expose many individuals vital information, sometimes social security numbers and credit card information. It's funny to me that these smart cyber attackers are focusing on college to find lucrative information due to most of the accounts are probably students who are broke from paying for college so they aren't going to receive my in the way of money from them. Other information though from professors may be useful so maybe they are guessing that out of 18K people at least they may yield a 1000+ that are useful. Just goes to show that cyber attacks can happen to anyone or any business at any time. No one is safe 100%.
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