Someone hacked into an Iowa State University computer system that stored confidential information of athletic donors and employees of the school — but it’s not believed the hackers wanted any of that info. Maury Hope of the I-S-U Information Technology Services department says the system holds information including credit card numbers of donors and Social Security numbers for some employees.
He says some of the information was encrypted, but some wasn’t and he says there’s the potential the hacker could’ve gotten the information. But, he says it doesn’t appear that getting the sensitive information was their motive. Hope says it appears that the hacker who wanted a place to store pirated movies.
Hope says many of the intrusions they find the hacker is not looking for personal information, they’re instead looking for a computer system with a large bandwidth and large amount of storage to store movies. He says the university’s system fits the criteria for bandwidth and storage and puts it on the hacker’s target list. While they don’t believe the hacker sought personal information — Hope says the university is contacting everyone who has information on the computer.
Hope says they’re in the process of sending out e-mails, and notifying people through their department supervisors and also plan some mailings. Hope says fighting off the Hackers is a constant battle. He says the computers did have the latest updates of software to ward off hackers, but he says there are always new ways that develop for someone to illegally tap into a system. He says it is frustrating to have the system breached.
Hope says it takes time and effort and resources to remediate the intrusion. He says in most cases the intruder isn’t trying to get sensitive information, but Hope says they still have to inform everyone when something like this happens. Hope says the system holds information for about 25-hundred athletic donors and three-thousand university employees
