On February 20, 2014 The University of Maryland announced it was "victim of a sophisticated computer security attack." Over 300,000 faculty, staff, and students who were issued an ID at their college had there personal information stolen. Information included names and social security numbers, dating all the way back to 1998. The university is offering a year of credit monitoring as compensation but for many it is already too late.
These type of attacks have happened before. Back in 2010, Ohio State University said that a cyber attack had successfully exposed 750,000 people to the risk of identity theft. In 2012, 18,000 students mistakenly had their social security numbers printed and mailed to their homes. More recently, the high profile hacking of the company Target was made public. Target's data breach in total effected 70 million of their consumers along with a handful of other retailers. Most of the attackers of these crimes were never found or arrested.
So what does this all mean? If anything, it seems that security isn't guaranteed anywhere on the internet. Whatever you put out into "cyberspace" has a real chance of being used at your expense. We, as the consumer, need to be more aware of this fact when searching the web, especially when we are using services that require our personal information. But other than being aware, can we do anything to limit these occurrences from happening? For the most part no. This job seems to rest upon the security companies hired to prevent these cyber attacks. Innovation is greatly needed in this sector of computer science to halt the growing flow of cyber crime. I'm mostly left with questions to whether we actually can prevent these type of attacks, and I've yet to see any sort of solution. As for now, the cyber war rages and is more tangible than it was ever before.
Related Article: Data Breach At University of Maryland Exposes 309,000 Records
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