When hackers broke into a Harvard University Web server last month, administrators first thought they were being taunted about their vulnerability. Now the university is reporting that the intruders may have done far worse, and accessed records of 10,000 people. Some of those records included Social Security numbers.
A Web server containing data on applicants to the university’s Graduate School of Arts and Sciences “was hacked by an outsider and compromised in a way that the data on the server could have been viewed or copied,” administrators said in a statement yesterday. More than 6,000 applicant records listed a name, Social Security number, date of birth, address, e-mail address, phone numbers, test scores, previous school attended, and school records.
The university said that its initial investigation into the incident, in late February, did not reveal the extent of the intrusion or the personal nature of all the data exposed. Further inquiries showed the potential for greater damage.
Harvard has sent notices to all affected people and is offering, at the university’s expense, to help them obtain credit reports, set up credit-monitoring services and fraud alerts, and take other steps to guard against identity thieves.—Josh Fischman
8 Responses to Harvard Security Breach Exposes Sensitive Student Data
mkt42 - October 14, 2011 at 3:36 pm
I’d never thought about this before, but I now know The Class That I Would Least Like To Take.
Robert Talbert - October 15, 2011 at 10:18 am
I had a hard time even finding an image for this post that doesn’t creep me out.
Guest - October 15, 2011 at 3:02 pm
Interesting that the Army has eliminated the IV needle training as a part of Basic Combat Training (at least the BCT I went through.) Their conclusion was that people with a little bit intravenous training are more dangerous than people who know they can’t do it and find other ways to administer combat first aid.
riosalado - October 17, 2011 at 11:49 am
Anyone who has taught Calculus to freshmen knows what it is like to get blood from things, at least metaphorically.
Kimber Palmer - October 17, 2011 at 1:16 pm
Wow. When I was in college I worked part time at a major big-city hospital as a phlebotamist. My training consisted of following someone around for a few shifts learning the correct tubes and paperwork, then being observed for shift while I jumped in and started sticking people. I had no idea to some people it is akin to rocket science. Sounds to me like someone is making a lot of money teaching something that is rather simple.
5768 - October 17, 2011 at 3:51 pm
“Do we design our courses specifically to give learners time and space in class to practice those skills and receive guidance and feedback on them?”
Depends on the class, depends on the students. The phlebotomy model under discussion is similar to most good laboratory courses in the sciences. Good laboratory courses require advance reading on the part of the student outside of class, with accountability in the form of a pre-laboratory quiz over the reading material before the hand-on laboratory is begun. No expectation of a quiz held by the teacher, no reading on the part of the student, and lots of wasted lab time. It’s that simple.
The trick is how to implement a similar model not in the laboratory but in the classroom, a model in which out-of-class accountability for content-based knowing in advance of lecture is the expectation on a daily basis. The sole way I have ever found this possible is to structure the classroom for quizzes (both individual and group) over the readings themselves. Individual quizzes demonstrate individual responsibility and group quizzes afford communications processing coupled with a measure of forgiveness (I average the two and the latter are always higher in scores). At one extreme, if we do nothing but lecture, the students default to us to tell them everything they are to know and don’t do sufficient outside work required for drill and deep learning. A perverse incentive that catches up with them by the first exam of the semester. If on the other hand we structure the classroom with group work that doesn’t require students first do their part out of class, the lack of accountability for the material will do nothing but lead to an infinitesimally small kinetic rate constant–to their advantage since less has to be learned and they then expect to be tested on less, another perverse incentive.
“Or do we fill the class time with information transfer (whether it’s lecture or something else) instead?”
(1) Fill class time with information transfer if you are at an institution where students are intrinsically motivated, attend class, hang on your every word and have respect for that spoken word, and take an excellent set of notes. Does such a place exist anymore??? (2) Fill it with information transfer by lecture if you are in a discipline where excellent textbooks have yet to be published, where solutions manuals don’t exist, and where your gifted oratory is being recorded for posterity, which today means YouTube.
Ultimately we find ourselves faced with issues of extrinsic motivation necessary to structure learning where intrinsic motivations appear to be increasingly lacking. A teacher can do only so much in either case and today’s forces conspire teachers and students alike to do too less and less, only exacerbating the problem.
catbertie - October 18, 2011 at 12:37 pm
Laboratory services now require all employees to be certified at the job they are performing. This means whether we wish to be a cytotech or phlebotomist, education is a requirement in order to sit for certification. OTJ training does not exist anymore….
Todd R - May 7, 2012 at 7:16 pm
Its not that hard.
I was taking the practice test at
http://phlebotomytrainingonlinecertification.com/
and it isnt so hard mkt42