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Opinion
Does UCLA Have a Campuswide, Integrated Crisis Plan?
12/13/2006
[C]ontrolling risks to personal information through enhanced information security has become the subject of state and federal laws. The recent upsurge in the number of state and federal laws and regulations represents an emerging legal standard that imposes obligations on colleges and universities to protect the data they collect, store, process, use, and disclose. These laws increasingly affect how higher education institutions, often operating in multiple jurisdictions, handle personal information, including sensitive health and financial data. Many of the new laws require disclosures to victims when there is unauthorized access to systems containing sensitive information. Failure to protect this type of information will inevitably result in public embarrassment and the financial costs associated with managing the response to incidents and may also result in investigations, fines, and other penalties
Adler is a proponent of centralized control and security for this kind of information. (Note, also, that the EDUCAUSE Resource Center on the topic of Cybersecurity.)
Centralized control of anything is a difficult thing to achieve on any college campus, much less on a campus the size and complexity of UCLA. Even folks outside of higher education realize this: “'Universities tend to have a lot of information floating around in a lot of different places,' said Jay Foley, executive director of the Identity Theft Resource Center, a San Diego-based nonprofit. ‘They are places we send our children to share ideas, and it's hard to mix the open sharing of ideas with the need to tighten down on security.'”
But from what we know right now, the information is being reported as having been exposed from a central campus database. According to Rodney Peterson, security task force coordinator for EDUCAUSE, who was contacted by Campus Technology staff, that and the size of the breach are the specifically unique elements of this UCLA incident.
This UCLA story has also reached public attention on a scale not seen before. A pertinent Google News search at 7:55 am on Wednesday, December 13, brings up 362 current news articles related to this. You know the story is in the big time when it is one of the three Top News Stories on National Public Radio's (NPR) front page. It's definitely become a “reputational crisis” for UCLA, and it will be interesting to see how well the institution's IT staff, legal staff, and communications staff handle this.
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