Hacker cracks University of Arizona network, may have breached employee information

A hacker may have obtained the personal information of University of Arizona employees, as well as details of the institution's financial transactions.

Students' personal information was not compromised when a hacker accessed the university network in an incident discovered last week.

University employees discovered unauthorized movies and games on the network Jan. 2, according to a report in the Tucson Citizen. The hacker, who authorities believe lives in France based on his or her IP address, could potentially have obtained university credit card details, information about transactions between university departments, and an unknown number of employees' Social Security numbers, according to press reports.

The university's Police Department and the FBI are investigating the incident, which left network service disrupted while PCs were cleaned and equipped with stronger prevention solutions, according to press reports.

Hackings of large universities are nothing new. Just last month, the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) began alerting 800,000 people associated with the school that their personal information may have been compromised. UCLA officials discovered that hackers had been exploiting an undetected security hole in a database for more than a year.