<p>"LOS ANGELES, California (AP) -- Officials at the University of California Los Angeles alerted about 800,000 current and former students, faculty and staff on Tuesday that their names and certain personal information were exposed after a hacker broke into a campus computer system.</p>
<p>The attacks on the database began in October 2005 and ended November 21 of this year, when computer security technicians noticed suspicious database queries, according to a news release posted on a school Web site set up to answer questions about the theft.</p>
<p>This is not the only university where this has happened to a greater or lesser degree. I received an email from my undergrad alma mater (the one where I went when the dinos roamed) and their alumni data base was hacked. They were informing everyone....they did not know whose information had been taken...but the info hacked into included social security numbers (one reason why I wonder why I'm glad many universities have gone away from using this piece of data). This one is a big name school...mine isn't as "high profile"...but there were a ton of people affected. My guess is that this is not all that uncommon.</p>
<p>The article I read in the LA Times seemed to suggest that universities are probably common targets due to their open nature, and that UCLA is probably not the first...or last...to realize this. </p>
<p>I'm just not thrilled that UCLA is getting so much bad press this year...:rolleyes:</p>