University of Maryland

The University of Maryland announced a data breach impacting 309,000 student faculty and staff records. The university said it detected authorized access to a database in February. The attacker removed containing the names, date of birth, and student identification numbers of current and former students and employees since 1998. The cause of the data breach is still under investigation.

The attacker gained access to the information by uploading malware to a university website used for uploading photos, according to university president Wallace Loh, who spoke to the Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation. Loh said the attacker then obtained the account credentials of IT personnel maintaining the server. He told the committee that the university should have deleted much of the data from its systems.