University of Wisconsin Law School has made it official that its database was recently targeted by cyber crooks who purloined vital info about 1,213 applicants of 2005-2006. The stolen information includes social security numbers, contact details, and house addresses along with their educational details.
In a statement released to Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, the Wisconsin law school said that the cyber attack took place last week in which several records of applicants were exposed. In order to prevent any identity theft, the law school has emailed an apology to all those who were affected by the cyber attack and included a service option which provides them access to an expert in a data breach and recovery services.
The University of Wisconsin Law School is also trying its best to mitigate the data risk of the current cyber attack. The law school has also assured that security measures to protect the info of the applicants have been increased.
On an additional note, the law school is also interested in implementing vulnerability identification programs, which helps identify and decommission those no longer needed. The law firm has also assured that access to databases will be tightened and deployment of additional network intrusion detection systems will be done by this year end.
The data leak is being probed by a special cyber team from New York which is being assisted by Wisconsin Police department. The Prima Facie report filed by New York police suggests that the database was using a high-end encryption algorithm and so the leaked info of over 1200 applicants will perhaps prove useless to hackers.
As per a survey conducted by Booz Allen Hamilton, Cyber Espionage on law firms is said to have increased by 70% in this year. The technology related consulting firm has predicted that more such attacks will be seen in 2017, as hackers see law firm databases as gold mines to mint ransom.
The only way to deal with this situation is to have dispersed backups which are high encrypted, an effective disaster recovery plan to achieve utmost business continuity during such crisis and to educate employees dealing with sensitive info on how smart data security practices can increase the resiliency of law firms against cyber attacks.
