Hackers harvested City College of S.F. data since 1999
Fingers are being pointed at criminal networks based in Russia and China as the culprits behind the more-than-decade-long siphoning of personal banking information from students, faculty and staff of the City College of San Francisco.How many victims? Perhaps tens of thousands.
What type of personal information? Personal banking information.
What happened? Following the Thanksgiving holiday, the college's data security monitoring service, USDN, detected at least seven viruses activated each day at 10 p.m. that trawled the college's system (including its administrative, instructional and wireless networks), relaying data back to servers in Russia, China and several other countries.
What was the response? Victims, according to state law, must be notified. The college's CTO, David Hotchkiss, shut down the computer lab where the virus was originally detected and notified officials. An investigation is ongoing.
Source: www.sfgate.com, San Francisco Chronicle, "Viruses stole City College of S.F. data for years," Jan. 13, 2012
