2005 – 2006 Middle noughties Higher Education cyber attacks, personal data

June 2005 became infamous due to the security incident that took place in the University of Hawaii. A former librarian, instead of catching marvelous blue waves and peacefully enjoying himself, stole personal data of about 150,000 students, staff and library patrons. The malefactor compromised the data in order to obtain fraudulent loans. 

Accessing databases of libraries to get critical data happened not only once that year, and the University of Utah had around 100,000 names and Social Security numbers of former employees stolen from library archival databases.

The next year brought much bigger losses resulted from Higher Education cyber attacks. About 800,000 records were stolen from a University of California at Los Angeles (UCLA) database. The leaked personal information on students, faculty and staff, parents and student applicants, including those who did not attend, contained names, SSNs, birth dates, home addresses, and contact information. It was also mentioned that 3,200 of the affected are current or former staff and faculty of UC Merced and UC’s Oakland head departments. 

In most cases, Higher Education cyber attacks that happened in 2005-2006 were focused on personal information thefts, such as SSN and other data