The University of California at Berkeley is the latest organization to suffer a damaging data security breach. The increasing number of security breaches and incidents has some calling for greater effort and controls of systems containing sensitive data.
University officials revealed last week that hackers successfully breached the student and alumni records system, gaining access to identifying information of more than 160,000 individuals. The pilfered data included Social Security numbers, health insurance information and limited medical history such as immunization records.
A post-incident analysis of the breach discovered that the hackers gained access as early as last October. The breach was discovered last month when IT administrators took a server offline for routine maintenance, during which time they discovered a message left by the hackers.