Hacker with ‘political agenda’ stole data from Columbia, university says

Suzanne Smalley reports:

A hacktivist with a “political agenda” broke into Columbia University IT systems and stole “targeted” student data in recent weeks, a university official said Tuesday.
It is unclear how long the hacker was in university systems but a Columbia spokesperson said there has been no threat activity detected since June 24. Last week, the school said it was investigating a cyberattack and the university’s website and other systems were intermittently offline.
“Our investigation has indicated the hackers are highly sophisticated and were very targeted in their theft of documents,” the university official said.

Read more at The Record.
Comment from DataBreaches: “Highly sophisticated” seems to be the public relations attempt this past year to suggest that the victim’s cybersecurity was appropriate and would have been just fine except for some very sophisticated hacking strategies. Maybe we will eventually find out exactly what Columbia considered “highly sophisticated.”