But Others Get Hacked Too!

Rob pointed to a UConn news release in the Jabber chatroom this morning about UConn having a server compromised with the personal information of their faculty, staff, and students.

I wish their ITS people the best. That’s a tough situation. It’s an uphill battle that Universities are fighting, people want information, and IT staffs at the Universities are under a lot of pressure to build systems to make that information available, and security is hard.

But what’s more than a bit disconcerting about the University’s own news release is this paragraph:

“Hacking into university computer systems is not uncommon. Other universities who have had problems include the University of Iowa, Stanford University, Purdue University, Middle Tennessee State University, Boston College, Northwestern University, George Mason University, Michigan State University, Tufts University, the University of California, Berkley and Carnegie Mellon University, among others.”

My own quick translation of this is:

“Hi, our official peers and other prestigious universities screw up too! That puts us in elite company with our peers! Come to UConn, we get hacked like other top tier universities!”

I think the PR people at UConn fell asleep on this one.

[p.s. They also spelled “Berkeley” as “Berkley”. Ug.]