Stanford University, one of the top ranked Universities of the United States and world, has become a victim to a cyber attack leading to data leak or unauthorized access of sensitive information. The leaked details include first and last names of students, their DOBs, contact mail address, phone numbers, email IDs, gender, ethnicity, race, citizenship, nativity, transcripts, resume, recommendation letter (if any) and filled up admission forms on a digital note.
Information is out that the security incident occurred because of a mis-configured database exposing student info between December 2022–January 2023.
Details are in that the data leak of students pursuing Economics PH.D program from the website was leaked in the incident and all of those 900 candidates affected in the incident were being notified by the University via digital communication.
Hackers can use stolen data for launching social engineering attacks such as phishing. However, this incident looks different as the hack occurred because of an exposed database that might have attracted many cyber criminals who are always on the prowl of such information that makes business sense to them.
NOTE- Many state hackers are always in search of such information as they analyze such classical data and later use it against the nation from which the data was stolen. Often, they are on the prowl of military and political information. And after COVID-19 crisis almost every developed nation has appointed a special cyber force to sieve such R&D data related to healthcare from servers connected to the internet and use them for the upcoming bio-war that might be launched in the next few months/years by any nation connected to Asia.
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