On June 24th, Columbia University experienced a significant system-wide outage affecting email, course platforms, library catalogs, and Zoom. During this incident, personal data of applicants from 2019 to 2024 was stolen. The breach appears politically motivated, with a hacker claiming the data was taken to investigate Columbia's adherence to affirmative action after the Supreme Court ruling against it. The hacker reportedly stole 460 gigabytes of sensitive data, including 1.8 million Social Security numbers, and put this information for sale to Bloomberg. Columbia has confirmed that at least some of the stolen records are accurate.
The hack appears to be politically motivated: the purported hacker told Bloomberg as much, saying they stole the data because they wanted to know whether Columbia had continued to engage in "affirmative action," admissions policies meant to improve opportunities for groups that colleges had once discriminated against, after the practice was barred in 2023 by the Supreme Court.
During that time, the personal data of at least every person who applied to Columbia between 2019 and 2024 was stolen. It’s not yet clear the full scope of the breach, according to Columbia.
The self-identified hacker said they had stolen 460 gigabytes, including 1.8 million Social Security numbers, financial aid package information, and employee pay stubs - the result of two months burrowing into Columbia's servers before finally gaining the highest level of access.
Every single service that required Columbia's official authentication service was affected, but maybe most eerily, images of President Donald Trump appeared on some screens across the campus.
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