By Gabriela Baron
The online student portal of San Beda University (SBU) has been infiltrated by a still unidentified hacker.
(Screencap from San Beda website)
"On June 5, we discovered an incident where your email address and password as used in the student portal was accessed by an unknown entity, purporting to be a hacker and illegally released the same publicly via social media platform Twitter," SBU said in a statement acquired by the Manila Bulletin.
According to the university, the hacker has gained access to personal data of students such as birthdays, postal addresses, email addresses, students grades, and statements of account.
Before the hack was confirmed, the student portal was defaced to flash a threat from the hacker: "Greetings San Beda University! Do we have your attention now? We're expecting from you. Don't try to provoke us, this message may serve as a warning."
SBU said the hacker got through the system set up by the third-party company, Princetech, that SBY hired for their Bedista Portal.
SBU has reached out to the National Bureau of Investigation and reported the incident to the National Privacy Commission.
"Data privacy is a matter we take very seriously. We are doing everything within our control to protect your information. This involves continually improving our systems, process, and policies, to respond to incidents such as this to prevent them from happening in the future," it said.
SBU is encouraging its community to change all the passwords of their accounts and secure them with a two-way authentication process.