Yet another well-publicized breach of online security and your personal data, this time at the UCLA, one of the nation’s largest public universities. You’d think that at such a large, prestigious institution, they’d have a dedicated security staff.

Oh, but they do. And it was the security staff that detected the breach after-the-fact. A quick investigation (e.g., “Let’s look at old log files!”) showed them that access attempts had been made since Oct. 2005. So for over a year, hackers had been knocking at this particular door in the university’s computer infrastructure and nobody noticed.

And this, my dear readers, is exactly why you should be suspicious of any company, institution, or organization, that simply says, “Hey, trust us! Trust us with your personal information. Trust us with your financial records. Trust us with your health data and records.”

If a university of UCLA’s stature and resources can’t prevent this sort of thing from happening, you’d better believe it can happen to any other company. Until organizations start taking security more seriously — and informing their customers exactly what measures they have in place to protect their data — you should be wary of giving too much data to any one organization or company online.

The University of California, Los Angeles alerted about 800,000 current and former students, faculty and staff on Tuesday that their names and certain personal information were exposed after a hacker broke into a campus computer system.

It was one of the largest such breaches involving a U.S. higher education institution.

The attacks on the database began in October 2005 and ended Nov. 21 of this year, when computer security technicians noticed suspicious database queries, according to a statement posted on a school Web site set up to answer questions about the theft.

Source: From the Washington Post, UCLA Probes Computer Security Breach
Also, the UCLA notification announcement

Dr. John Grohol is the CEO and founder of Psych Central. He is an author, researcher and expert in mental health online, and has been writing about online behavior, mental health and psychology issues -- as well as the intersection of technology and human behavior -- since 1992. Dr. Grohol sits on the editorial board of the journal Cyberpsychology, Behavior and Social Networking and is a founding board member and treasurer of the Society for Participatory Medicine.

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    Last reviewed: By John M. Grohol, Psy.D. on 12 Dec 2006
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