Wednesday, October 10, 2012

Anything to learn from university hacking-spree?


It's all over the news, a hacker group called @TeamGhostShell, targeted a hundred of the world's top universities stealing thousands of user's private information, posting it here. You can read it for ourself, but among other things, the group cite high tuition prices and generally unjust practices as the source for this assault.  When I heard about this I naively tried accessing some of the files, but they had been deleted and searching through the first three pages of Google is almost the extent of my very limited computer skills.  I found enough news reports about it, such as this article.  Which opened with this quote:
On Monday Team GhostShell returned with a new campaign called “Project WestWind”. The project is aimed at “raising awareness towards the changes made in today’s education, how new laws imposed by politicians affect us, our economy and overall, our way of life,” — and to make their presence known, how better than to dump data and expose vulnerabilities in university networks?
I"ll tell you how, analyze that data to show that universities are getting richer and richer off of student debt.  I can only hope there are some industrious data miners on @TeamGhostShell looking to stir up higher education.  People want a scandal, hopefully one that doesn't involve another Sandusky.

It'd be interesting to graph the relationship of tuition increase with average student debt by institution. And then what about average faculty salary compared to graduating student earnings? These are only some brief ideas, I think enough people want blood for the student debt crisis that any findings would be blowen out of proportion.
What information would you want exposed?

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