A hacker in Slovenia successfully managed to gain access to nine computers at the University of Nebraska. According to university representatives the incident occurred on the 8th of June and was brought to light the following day. The computers contained info on students and university employees, but no academic data was harmed in any way. The university is currently sending informative letters (2,035 in total) to all the people who may be affected by the attack.

The hacker is believed to be Slovenian because that is where the attack originated from, but it is impossible to determine this for sure. It is also difficult to establish if he/she intended to gain access to the academic database and use it in a malicious way or if he/she simply wanted to enlarge a botnet for spam propagation reasons. On Monday, when the attack was discovered, all the computers involved were secured; additional safety precautions were immediately put in place by the university in order to prevent such a think from happening again.

Because the computers in question contained such private information as names and social security numbers, the university is obliged to inform all those who could suffer from the attack. A decision has been made to inform all these people by letter, not by e-mail, phone, fax or other means of communication. UNK (short for University of Nebraska at Kearney) is advising caution in the unlikely situation that you will be contacted by any other means but by letter. The university has also decided to stop using social security numbers as a means of identification.

Deborah Schroeder, UNK assistant vice chancellor for Information Technology comments: "We have no evidence that an unauthorized individual has actually retrieved, or is using, any of the social security numbers for illegal or malicious activity. It is possible that the intrusion was intended to either disrupt normal business or use the computers' processing power to launch similar attacks on other computers, possibly only to proliferate spam. The intruder may not have been aware that files with personal information were stored on the computers. Although we have no reason to believe that the information has been compromised, we are bringing this incident to the attention of those whose Social Security numbers are involved so that they can take steps, exercising abundant caution, to protect themselves."

Schroeder has expressed the university's deepest regret in the matter and has ensured all those who have entrusted their private information to UNK that such an incident will be prevented in the future.