PSU College of Engineering hit in cyberattacks
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STATE COLLEGE (AP) – Penn State University was the victim of a cyberattack in which hackers stole usernames and passwords issued by the College of Engineering, prompting the school to begin notifying 18,000 people whose Social Security numbers or other personal information were stored on the targeted computers.
There’s no evidence any of that personal information was stolen in the attacks, Penn State said Friday, and investigators found that only a small number of the stolen College of Engineering accounts were used by the attackers to access the network.
The FBI notified Penn State of the hacking in November, but the school kept quiet for months while it investigated the breach and took steps to prevent a recurrence.
“In order to protect the college’s network infrastructure as well as critical research data from a malicious attack, it was important that the attackers remained unaware of our efforts to investigate and prepare for a full-scale remediation,” said Nicholas P. Jones, executive vice president and provost at Penn State.
The probe revealed two separate attacks, one of them launched from China, the school said.
The College of Engineering’s computer network has been temporarily disconnected from the Internet while engineers upgrade the system. The outage is expected to last several days.