FBI Investigating Theft Of Foreign Student Data

from the well,-that-was-useful dept

Last month we had a story wondering about the new system US colleges were being forced to put in place to spy on foreign students. It seems it didn't take long for such a system to be "abused". The FBI is looking for people who broke into that newly laucnhed system at the University of Kansas and stole all the data on foreign students. Of course, any time you have lots of private data being stored somewhere, there's the very real threat that it will be broken into. While it sounds like the theft in this case is unlikely to cause any major problems, imagine a situation where someone can upload changed information to such a database, which could then be used to frame a completely innocent person. Exactly how is this useful again?

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  1.  

    False Flag Operation

    identicon
    dorpus, Jan 27th, 2003 @ 3:10am

    On the other side of the coin, databases like this could appear to be less secure than they really are, to track down identity thieves.

    In the course of my studies in computer science, I have been around enough foreign students who openly hated the USA. It makes good sense to keep track of them.

    reply to this | link to this | view in thread ]

  2.  

    Re: False Flag Operation

    identicon
    Anonymous Coward, Jan 27th, 2003 @ 5:37am

    then again, thanks to the US's two party system, you've always got roughly half the coutry that hates the current administration. Better keep track of all US citizens, because you never know when the other party will be in the White House again.

    reply to this | link to this | view in thread ]


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