University of Pennsylvania confirms recent cyberattack led to major data theft

• Hackers accessed University systems via stolen SSO credentials, stealing data on 1.2 million individuals
• Offensive mass email followed partial lockout; University later confirmed the breach was real
• Attack exploited weak MFA enforcement among senior staff through social engineering

It seems the “obviously fake” and “fraudulent” claims recently made by the University of Pennsylvania hackers are not so “obviously fake” and “fraudulent”, after all - as the organization has now confirmed hackers stole files from its systems.

Cybercriminals recently revealed they had obtained “full access” to a University employee’s PennKey SSO account, which gave them access to its VPN, Salesforce data, Qlik analytics platform, SAP business intelligence system, and SharePoint files. Using that access, they stole data on approximately 1.2 million students, alumni, and donors.

The information stolen allegedly includes people’s names, dates of birth, addresses, phone numbers, estimated net worth, donation history, and demographic details (race, religion, sexual orientation, and similar).

Investigating the attack

After being thrown out from most of the network, they used what remaining access they had to send an angry email to roughly 700,000 recipients:

"The University of Pennsylvania is a dog**** elitist institution full of woke ret*rds. We have terrible security practices and are completely unmeritocratic," the email said.

"We hire and admit morons because we love legacies, donors, and unqualified affirmative action admits. We love breaking federal laws like FERPA (all your data will be leaked) and Supreme Court rulings like SFFA."

At first, the University of Pennsylvania described the emails as “obviously fake” and “fraudulent”, but backtracked on these claims in a recent update:

“Penn’s staff rapidly locked down the systems and prevented further unauthorized access; however, not before an offensive and fraudulent email was sent to our community and information was taken by the attacker,” the update reads. “Penn is still investigating the nature of the information that was obtained during this time.”

Penn also said that the attack was done through social engineering. Most employees are required to use multi-factor authentication (MFA) but according to TechCrunch, some of the top brass was allowed to skip this step.

Via TechCrunch

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