Personal information and over 160,000 University of Wisconsin System records were stolen during a cyberattack that affected the National Student Clearinghouse, according to emails obtained by The Daily Cardinal.
It’s part of a massive global cyberattack affecting governments, businesses and educational institutions that tech reporters at The Verge called the “biggest data theft” of 2023.
And while many affected institutions — Michigan State University (MSU) and the University of Illinois, for example — quickly issued student- and public-facing statements on the breach, pointing to lengthy time periods for victim identification, the UW System didn’t follow suit.
UW System spokesperson Mark Pitsch told the Cardinal the UW System was “entirely dependent upon the NSC” for information about the breach and chose not to make an immediate public announcement.
“Rather than prematurely announcing that we were affected and unnecessarily alarming tens of thousands of students, we waited to make decisions based on facts as we always do,” Pitsch said in an email. ”It took several weeks for NSC to provide all of the details, and at no point in the process did we believe the incident reached a level to merit a widespread breach notification message.”
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Sadly, today; journalism is a rare exception to pablum.