Another School Exposes Private Information

DutchSter writes "In the wake of other schools announcing the theft of hardware containing sensitive student information, Miami University, of Oxford, Ohio, has announced that a file containing the name, Social Security number, the grade point average for the Fall 2002 semester, cumulative grade point average, and other related academic information, such as credit hours attempted that semester, for all 21,000 students who attended the Fall 2002 term has been available on a web server for the last three years. The discovery was made this week and the university is taking steps to deal with the fall-out sure to come."

It's Everywhere

Miami University, of Oxford, Ohio

Miami, Ohio, England, where the hell is this University?

Re:It's Everywhere

Just a bit northwest of Cincinnati. [google.com]

Private information

I know this is a major breach of privacy/security, but I'm curious about what kinds of malicious things one could do with this information.
It seems to me that the only useful thing is the names/SSN combination.
Unless you could blackmail some poorly-achieving students by threatening to tell their parents their real marks?

Included demographics

The information released also included demographics. I've obtained the information and masked off the personally identifying information so I could show the sort of demographic information made available:

... Gender Dress ...
... Male, Khaki shorts, white T-shirt, ball cap
... Female, Khaki shorts, white T-shirt, ball cap with pony tail pulled through
... Male, Khaki shorts, white T-shirt, ball cap
... Female, Khaki shorts, white T-shirt, ball cap with pony tail pulled through
... Male, Khaki shorts, white T-shirt, ball cap
... Male, Khaki shorts, white T-shirt, ball cap
... Female, Khaki shorts, white T-shirt, ball cap with pony tail pulled through
... Female, Khaki shorts, white T-shirt, ball cap with pony tail pulled through
... Male, Khaki shorts, white T-shirt, ball cap
... Female, Khaki shorts, white T-shirt, ball cap with pony tail pulled through

(if you've been there, you'll understand)

Miami University, of Oxford, Ohio

Miami University... must be in Florida.

Oh, it's in Oxford... must be in England.

Bzzzzzt. BUT NO! It's in Ohio!

It must have taken a long time to come up with that combination of naming and placement.

Re:Miami University, of Oxford, Ohio

We were here first [muohio.edu] :P

Explanation

You can joke, but Miami were a group of native Americans indigenous to the midwest, including Ohio. A river in the area is also named after the tribe, and has been for hundreds of years.

The city in Florida sprung up at the end of the 1800s, and adopted the name because they thought it meant something vaguely pleasant regarding water.

So if anybody's ignorant, it's actually the clowns in Florida.

is this a fark post?

Miami University...in Oxford...Ohio.

Met a girl from Miami that went to Oxford, and didn't like the song "Ohio." Seems a little less obscure, too. Yet, this school has 21,000 students? I mean...that's more than the real Oxford...the one that's not in Ohio, but has students from Miami...

now that they've had their data exposed...

the university will refund their tuition for the year.

that's what i would expect at a minimum. on top of other punishment for letting it happen in the first place.

this only reinforces the notion i have that there is absolutely no privacy. once your data is in someone elses hands (and all your data does in fact belong to them) you can kiss your privacy goodbye.

there is no recourse whatsoever. you cannot even sue them or ask for damages.

your personal data is obviously worth something to sell to third party "warehouses" but when they expose your data to the whole world, at that point it ceases to be worth anything...

Just say 'No' to giving schools the SSN

No school needs an SSN. For that matter just say no to giving it to anybody but the IRS and your financial institutions. Your doctor doesn't need it. The gas company doesn't need it. Cingular and Earthlink don't need it.

Re:Just say 'No' to giving schools the SSN

I think it has something to do with financial aid, work study, etc.

That fits with my experience

Anything computer-related done by either government or schools tends to be incompetently executed and annoying, probably because when you need to deal with them, you need to deal with them - you're not a customer and if you don't like the way they do things, you can go fuck yourself. There's no reason for them to care about you, and it would be irrational for them to spend much money on giving you a better experience (well, up until the point that they get in trouble for leaking your private info on the web, that is). At least that's my theory to explain my experiences.

SchoolMAX SchoolHAX

Over the Summer, my school's district replaced their old SIS (Student Information System) with "SchoolMAX", designed by Maximus. After talking to a guidance counselor regarding schedule modifications, I noticed her log in to the new system - I noticed it required 4 credentials, one which the counselor left blank, and I made a mental note to Google the name of the system for more info on it for curiosity sake. The counselor printed me my new schedule, right from the web page. Sweet, thanks for doing the work for me - the URL was on the bottom of the sheet. I got home, hopped on the web, and keyed in the URL. The credentials required were school district, operator ID, password, and screen ID. Screen ID was what the counselor had left blank, so I was down to 3. I figured school district would be available online - a quick Google search confirmed this, and I was down to 2 fields remaining. There doesn't seem to be any real security on the site, and I predict a simple brute force or something more practical such as social engineering would enable anyone to an entire district worth of information.

Get used to it

In constrast to most /. types, I have pretty much given up on "privacy" in this sense. We live in a world that is becoming more and more connected and wired every day. Within that context, it becomes more and more possible for people to obtain information about one another. Perhaps we should be thinking more about how to embrace this reality rather than fruitlessly attempting to resist it. Just a thought...

probably happens all the time

A lot of universities have not-well-advertised public ftp servers that are used for transferring large files, generally with scripts that scrub things that have been around for more than a day to avoid turning into warez servers. I know of one multi-campus institution where an employee at one campus and their counterpart at another campus agreed to use this method to transfer a list of all currently enrolled students at one of the campuses. This included phone numbers, addresses, and student ID numbers, which were mostly SSNs, because that was the default and most students didn't know to ask for a different ID number. Once the transfer was complete and they discovered they could not delete files from this server, they called support, and it was gone in under 5 minutes. They'd already had it drilled into their heads how bad it would be if such a list got out, but no procedure for securely transferring very large files had been established, and they did not have the technical expertise to establish one themselves.

I imagine this happens a lot, especially at research institutions whose scientists need to be able to receive large amounts of data from collaborators without having to set up accounts for them.

Free identity theft monitoring

For free identity theft monitoring, please send your name, social security number, birth date, credit card numbers with expiration dates, and address to [e-mail]. We will take care of your credit record for you and guarantee that you will never have to worry about your good credit record ever again.

I'm glad I was in college in the 1980s

Back then we carried around sheets of paper with our information. Some used a redundancy method known as "carbon copy" - in which the user would write once and the data would be recorded in many places.

Though I had to physically walk miles to track down professors without watches, the data was always securely stored in the back pocket of my jeans or stuffed into my backpack.

Best of all, we relied upon social engineering security and things like locked wooden file cabinets. The security team was staffed by should-have-already-retired women who hated all people and wore too-tight pastel colored polyester blouses and shirts. But nothing got past them.

Re:Who are they hiring?

...and where do I send my resume ?

Re:Who are they hiring?

The space where the data was hosted was in a public space. The problem was that the ex-chair put the private files in public space. Since then, the IT dept. responsible for the business dept. (not our central IT Services) has since made all of those files unavailable to unauthenticated users.

Re:Who are they hiring?

I got some inside information on the real story...

Apparantly there's this list of all the students academic info that's sent out to all the Deans each semester. One of the Deans gave it to another professor for whatever reason and that professor accidently puts it on a public drive and forgets about it for 3 years.

Nice. Real nice.

Re:Who are they hiring?

A lot of times it is not administrators who are directly doing this (i.e. its much bigger than one person or they have no real way of knowing). Information security is far more than simply one person's job. Everyone who has access to information - even the poor grad student who does backups on Sunday nights - should be responsible in some way for security.

It takes a lot of work to make strong, accountable policies and carefully define simple, but narrow ways of accessing information (i.e. not just dumping the student records excel file in the share folder). For example, everyone on campus has network access which is most often directly linked to online access. If one person screws up and misuses their data access priveleges by opening up information over the network, it is very hard to tell unless you have accountability in place. And how many places do security reviews?

When it becomes part of people's jobs to protect information, it will become a responsibilty. Right now, blaming one or two people is rarely a good solution. It's like someone who blames an outsourced medical transcripts worker in Pakistan for leaking information. Sure, it is there fault but the problem is much larger than one low-paid worker. Executive or peon, security is a group responsibility in information-rich, networked environments.

Re:Who are they hiring?

The problem is not web admins. The problem is with clueless end users who are careless with sensitive data. As an admin, you're faced with hundreds of gigs to terabytes of stuff on your servers. It is impossible to police it. How would you begin to go about searching for social security numbers? Think of all the ways it could be encoded, and all of the false positives you would find in conducting such a search.

I could be wrong here. If someone knows a way to scan an entire enterprise, when you don't have admin access to a number of the systems, and you don't have a list of all of the programs which are in use (so you don't know all the proprietary data formats), I would love to hear about your solution. Oh, you probably also need to be able to search documents and databases for encrypted versions, even though you don't have the keys... Management at the university I work for asked how we could scan the enterprise to find all sensitve data after we had a similar incident.

The person who posted the data on the website is clearly the one who is responsible for that data. That would be the retired faculty member. An admin is responsible for keeping the web server running. Was the information available on the Internet? If so, the admin was doing a their job well.

There are some fundamental questions universities need to be asking themselves:

• Why do faculty members have access to Social Security numbers?
• What are you doing with Social Security numbers to begin with? Sure, you need them for employees, but why for students?
• Why do faculty members have access to other sensitive pieces of data? If they don't need it, they shouldn't have access (principal of least privilege)

Why doesn't the government step in in these situations? Clearly this is a FERPA violation on a huge scale. The individual who put the information on the website ultimately should be held accountable. If nothing else, action should be taken against the university. If the university gets more than a slap on the wrist, you can bet that the next person to do something dumb like this will be held accountable by the university.

I probably shouldn't ask for that, as they'll probably decide it's the sys admin's fault...

Re:My SSN is stolen - I can't party anymore!

It's named after the Miami tribe of Native Americans who used to live in the area. I go there, and yeah it's a joke. I'm just there because it's somewhere close while I decide where I want to really go. Wasn't always like that though, and to all the Miami Flordia people, Miami U was a school before Flordia was a state.

Peace

P.S.
yay, my first post!!

Re:TFA from a MU Grad who Just got Notice

Before you start blaming every CS student maybe you should read the full explanation on their site, which among other things says:

"On Monday, September 12, 2005, Miami University became aware that a grade report from the Fall 2002 semester had been unwittingly placed by a now-retired faculty member into a file that was accessible via the Internet.

Note the 'retired faculty member'. Not a student or a hacker.

This seems like a common problem, how does one protect again appending sensitive information from a protected document into an ordinary text or non-sensitive file? Is there a technology out there that can mark the data so it can not be copied into another file even though it is accessible to some. Apparently the 'now retired faculty member' had access to the file. Probably used cut and paste to imbed it into a file he/she could access from home/laptop etc. We had lots of problems like this at government locations I worked at

I understand your anger but this does not seem to be a malicious act, it appears to be an honest screw up and is not like the stupidity of Citibank sending their files via un-encrypted tapes by UPS.

The school seems to be handling this OK.

Re:Another Security issue

It was later found out to be a misspelt url that was causing the problem.