Universities Leaking Student Data
from the happens-all-the-time dept
While there are plenty of stories about businesses not doing a great job securing databases, the number of stories about universities leaking confidential information about students is getting a bit scary. The universities claim that it’s tougher to secure the data, since it needs to be more openly accessible to the wider world, but I wonder if that’s really true. For example, corporations routinely use VPN systems to make give remote users a secure connection to corporate systems. Are we reaching a point where university students, faculty and staff will need VPNs just to connect to their own data?
Comments on “Universities Leaking Student Data”
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This shouldn’t come as a surprise to anybody who has worked with campus administrations (especially state schools). If you know how to look, you can find lots of documents (mostly spreadsheets with names, SSNs, grades) on public web servers and horribly insecure web applications at almost any school.
They won’t change, because nobody is making them change. They aren’t motivated enough to clean up their act by themselves.