The Kashmir University (KU) on Wednesday set up a special information technology team to look into the likely grey hackers, who hack for fun, and had made any attempt to put the data of thousands of undergraduate students for sale at $250 on the dark web recently.
Sources said the Kashmir University’s IT cell received a mail on Tuesday alerting about data theft and likely sale on the dark web. The alert contained data tables regarding undergraduate students’ semester examinations forms, with complete credentials of the students pursuing different courses with the Kashmir University.
“Our IT team’s probe has so far found that no data regarding marks sheets or any private details of students were highlighted in the tables. No data of teachers related to their services and salaries stand compromised,” Dr Maroof Qadri, Director Information Technology and Support Systems, told The Hindu.
He said there was no modification, deletion or updating of data of thousands of details of students and teachers. “We have run a comparison to check any data manipulation. Nothing has been found so far,” he added.
“The text file that raised an alert is being looked into seriously. That particular data has been quarantined for now. The associate services are also being segregated for now,” Dr. Qadri said.
The Kashmir University, in a statement, said the alleged breach was being analysed and as per the preliminary analysis it has been found that the data is unmodified.
“Any breach on data read (which is already accessible in public domain) is being analyzed in-depth and depending upon the analysis, University will take further course of action and take an appropriate legal recourse accordingly,” the Kashmir University spokesperson said.
Meanwhile, the Kashmir University is preparing to shift the data to infra with a better security system soon, officials said.
