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Opinion
Does UCLA Have a Campuswide, Integrated Crisis Plan?
12/13/2006
By Terry Calhoun
My heart g'es out to campus IT folks who experience private data security breaches. I know—we all know—that, except for a few extreme cases, each one of these could be any of us. No matter how hard we try, there is always some vulnerability. The latest, of course, is the largest campus-based breach of all: More than 800,000 records at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA).
About 800,000 database records on students, faculty, and staff were “exposed” in a series of intrusions that went on from October of 2005 until late November 2006. Some of the information at risk included birth dates, Social Security numbers, names, and other information useful in identity theft. The university says there is no direct evidence that any of the information was actually misused, and it's doing its best to do the right thing:
"In spite of our diligence, a sophisticated hacker found and exploited a subtle vulnerability in one of hundreds of applications," said Jim Davis, UCLA's chief information officer and associate vice chancellor for information technology. "We deeply regret the concern and inconvenience caused by this illegal activity. We have reconstructed and protected the compromised database and launched a comprehensive review of all computer security measures to accelerate systematic enhancements that were already in progress."
In recent months, I've taken a more subdued approach to news items in IT Trends about such breaches, much for the same reason that I don't focus that much on another building, or another part of a campus getting wireless access points. Who cares? Well, the answer is that the folks living or working in a location without a good wireless signal care
The IT staffers involved care about wireless ubiquity, too, but no one's likely to lose their job because the planning for wireless connectivity is too slow or is over budget. That stays a pretty strictly internal affair except for an occasional letter to the editor of a student newspaper.
Hackers getting into personal information is an entirely different story. Not only is it a reputational crisis for the institution--just ask the folks at Ohio University, which experienced five separate incidents last spring that included exposure of the president's personal information and not only resulted in tremendous staff angst (including a new CIO), but became the catalyst and focus for other criticisms of the institution's overall management and reputation--that kind of breach brings federal and state laws into play and ignites some pretty extreme phobias among students, faculty, staff, alumnae, vendors, and so forth. Here's Peter Adler, of Adler InfoSec & Privacy Group LLC and former interim Chief Information Security Officer at the University of Colorado puts it in a recent EDUCAUSE Review article:
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