Earlier this month, a group of former and current students from the University of California Berkeley filed a lawsuit against Google, alleging the Internet firm of scanning the educational Gmail accounts of the school to gather analytics data.
It seems that UC Berkeley's cyber troubles do not end there, as officials of the school have sent out warnings to about 80,000 people due to a hacker attack on its system which stored sensitive data.
The people are composed of former and current faculty, students, staff and vendors, who may have had their bank account information and Social Security numbers compromised.
According to a UC Berkeley statement, an individual hacker or a group of hackers were able to infiltrate computers part of the Berkeley Financial System, or BFS, in late December 2015. BFS is a software which the school uses for financial management purposes, including making purchases and other payments aside from salaries.
The hackers were able to gain access to the computers through a vulnerability which the university was fixing at the time of the incident.
"The security and privacy of the personal information provided to the university is of great importance to us," said Paul Rivers, UC Berkeley chief information security officer, who added that the institution has improved its security in protecting the compromised information.
While no definite evidence has so far been acquired to say for sure that hackers were able to access, extract and use the sensitive information, UC Berkeley is informing the individuals that could have been affected by the cyberattack so that they would be on alert for signs that their information is being used wrongly. The school has also extended credit protection services to these individuals for free, which includes one full year of credit monitoring and insurance for identity theft. The individuals will also be assisted in monitoring their own accounts.
The affected individuals are made up of about 57,000 former and current students, 18,800 former and current staff, including student workers, and 10,300 vendors. The numbers add up to more than 80,000 people, as the school noted that individuals could belong to multiple categories.
Alarmingly, the figures represent about 50 percent of UC Berkeley's current students and 65 percent of the current staff.
