A notorious hacking group has claimed responsibility for last year’s data breaches at Harvard University and the University of Pennsylvania (UPenn) and has released the data they claim to have stolen from the two schools.
On Wednesday, the group known as ShinyHunters released what it claims are more than 1 million files from every university on the group’s dedicated leak site, which the gang uses to blackmail its victims.
In November, UPenn confirmed a data breach of “a select group of information systems related to Penn’s alumni development and activities.” At the time, the hackers also sent emails to alumni announcing the hack from official university addresses.
The university blamed the breach on social engineering, an attack that often relies on hackers impersonating someone and tricking them into doing something they wouldn’t normally do. In this official breach disclosure websitewhich has since been taken offline, UPenn did not say exactly what kind of data the hackers stole, saying only that the cybercriminals accessed “systems related to Penn’s alumni development and activities.”
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TechCrunch verified a portion of the data set by checking with alumni and public records, such as matching the data to student ID numbers.
Later in November, Harvard University also confirmed a breach of its alumni systems, blaming a voice phishing attack, meaning an attack where hackers tricked targets into clicking a link or opening an attachment with a voice call.
Harvard he said that the stolen data included email addresses, phone numbers, home and business addresses, event attendance, university donation details and other biographical information related to the university’s fundraising and alumni engagement activities.
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The data published by ShinyHunters, seen by TechCrunch, appears to match the type of information both universities said was stolen last year.
The hackers said they released the stolen data because universities refused to pay ransoms to prevent them from doing so. Cybercriminals like ShinyHunters often try to blackmail their victims by demanding payment in exchange for not publishing the data they stole, and if the victims refuse payment, they then publish the data online.
During the UPenn breach, the hackers made it appear that they were politically motivated, specifically voicing their displeasure with affirmative action policies. “We hire and admit idiots because we love legacies, donors, and inappropriate affirmative action admits it,” the hackers wrote in the email sent to alumni.
ShinyHunters is not known to be politically motivated. The hackers did not respond to a question about why they included that language in the email.
Penn spokesman Ron Ozio told TechCrunch that the university is “analyzing the data and will notify any individual if required by applicable privacy regulations.”
Harvard did not respond to a request for comment.
