Another school has experienced the joy of the “whoops” factor. On Friday McGill University in Montreal Quebec was alerted to an information leak on student information. The info was made available via their search function on the school website.
“The first feeling was, oh my God, I’m looking at something dirty.… I shouldn’t be looking at this. This is not right. This is personal information,” said McGill graduate Kent Glowinski, who visited the school’s website to look up some routine information.
Glowinski, who had typed his surname into the search engine, got his brother’s transcripts: every course, mark, and significant statistic about his time at McGill.
“I saw my personal transcript out there in cyberspace and it was utter horror, because my transcripts, it shows the highlights and the low points of my four-year academic career at McGill University and I was horrified,” Devin Glowinski said.
The school said that they had moved to fix the problem as soon as they were made aware. Um, OK. So, my question would be this. How long was student information hanging out in the clear? It took a call from the CBC before they were aware of the problem. The school said
only a handful of people appear to have looked at the sensitive data. They’ve apologized to Glowinski and they are reviewing their system.
OK, so who are those people? And being the curious type that I am I strolled over to the McGill site to try my hand. I did not attend McGill so I tried my last name “Lewis” and “transcript”. Pretty common name. Nope, no love from the search. A good sign. But, I did notice this info to the right of the search box after I made my query.
Results 1 to 10 of about 132 for “Lewis transcript”. (0.268772 seconds)
Hmmm…now, where have I seen that format before?
Results 1 - 10 of about 168,000 for McGill Data Breach. (0.10 seconds)
Tags: McGill Data Leak, Privacy, Student Information, Google Hacking
