Penn State announced that it has detected another cyber attack. The recent attack has been confirmed by the university on its’s College of Liberal Arts server.
Penn State has stated that several systems have been compromised by cyberattacks; which have been accounted as two in number by anonymous threats.
FireEye cyber forensic unit, Mandiant has taken over the case and has been trying to investigate and analyse the attacks, that took place on the 4th of May; Seven weeks since then, the university now states that no harm has occurred in regards to the personally identifiable information(PII) or any other research data, since the it had introduced advances cybersecurity measures after the attacks on the College of Engineering servers.
Mandiant’s spokesperson, Nick Pelletier revealed that the attacks took place for the first time in 2014 within a 24-hour time period, while the latter breach was taken into action during March to May in 2015. Mandiant is not sure if the attackers are the same chinese group that attacked engineering.
Nick Jones, vice-president of Penn State in an official statement said that advanced monitoring systems have been introduced into the entire university network with constant support of Mandiant and the the attackers will be soon tracked down.
The attacks in the state university systems have created a threat for federal systems. Where any PII or research data was not compromised, some college-issued usernames and passwords were stolen and accessed. As a result, all the compromised accounts are being renewed and more information can be gathered from http://securepennstate.psu.edu.
