Hackers target student records of 53 universities

Hackers last week published online thousands of personal records from 53 universities including Harvard, Stanford, Cornell, Princeton, Johns Hopkins, the University of Zurich and other universities around the world, writes Nicole Perlroth for The New York Times.

The group of hackers, calling themselves Team GhostShell, via Twitter claimed responsibility for the attack. They published some 36,000 email addresses and thousands of names, usernames, passwords, addresses and phone numbers of students, faculty and staff, to the website Pastebin.com.

The hackers said they were not motivated by profit but to “raise awareness towards the changes made in today’s education”. In a message accompanying the stolen data, they bemoaned changing education laws in Europe and spikes in tuition fees in the United States. But they also noted that in many cases, the servers they breached had already been compromised.
Full report on the New York Times site