Tohoku Gakuin: ransomware on a work PC leaks 7,085 records including student grades

On 6 November 2024 Tohoku Gakuin said an outside attacker had misused a staff member's work PC and that 7,085 personal data records had leaked. On 7 September the PC was infected with ransomware, work data was downloaded from a shared drive, and the data and the PC then became unusable; the attack was found on 9 September. The PC sat on a network reachable from outside the university, and its user ID and password were stolen and used to get in. The leak covers names, phone numbers and email addresses of 119 people at 41 system vendors; student numbers, names and email addresses of 3,490 students including graduates (with grades in one 2023 course for 3,071 of them); and 3,476 staff records with staff numbers and names. The university says the leaked grade lists did not directly link individuals to grades, and that student lists may overlap.