The breach impacting one of the nation's top schools for computing was acknowledged by the university as higher education in general faces a growing assault by digital intruders.
"A third party briefly accessed files which included some personal information of current or former students, employees, applicants or contractors," the university said in a statement provided to TribLive by spokesman Peter Kerwin. "Our information security office secured the system within hours of detection and quickly engaged law enforcement."
The university said there is no evidence of fraud or misuse of the information.
Carnegie Mellon sent out notices starting Jan. 12 to those impacted, once the investigation concluded, Kerwin said.
"Out of an abundance of caution, CMU is offering credit monitoring and other services through Experian for anyone who may be impacted," the university statement said.
The statement from Kerwin did not address the kinds of information accessed. The school so far has not commented on a report this week from the cybersecurity web site, Cybernews, that the information included names, social security numbers and dates of birth.
Nationwide, the high-tech cat-and-mouse game between cyber criminals and law enforcement agencies has intensified. According to one report, the stakes for schools in Pennsylvania are among the highest.
An account published on the web site of University Business that cited the consumer web site Comparitech said Pennsylvania schools ranked fifth highest in the number of records breached over the last two decades.
The report said that nationwide, there were about 32 million records compromised during the last two decades in 2,700 education data breaches. Higher education accounted for half of those and for 80 percent of records hacked.
Pennsylvania saw 57 breaches and 283,00 records impacted, behind these states:
- California, 160 breaches and 2.3 million records affected;
- New York, 82 breaches and 758,000 records impacted;
- Massachusetts, 65 breaches affecting 1.8 million records;
- Ohio: 57 breaches,1.8 million records impacted
The incident at Carnegie Mellon dates to Aug, 25 when the university's Information Security Office at Carnegie Mellon University detected suspicious activity on a university computer system.
A total of 7,343 people received notifications.
Carnegie Mellon enrolls about 16,300 students and and has 6,100 faculty and staff, according to the university's website.
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