Writing for the Pantagraph, Lenore Sobota reports: “Thirteen faculty and staff members at Illinois State University were the apparent victims of an information breach that allowed someone to divert their direct-deposit payroll payments to another account, according to university officials.”

So, as if the furloughs caused by Illinois’ budget impasse and the further austerity that will result if Governor Rauner’s budget proposals are ever adopted were not more than enough to make university employees uneasy, now some employees have the added insecurity of knowing that someone has intercepted the direct deposit of their checks and access to who know how much of their personal information and financial records.

If you are thinking that this story to be merely of local interest and that far bigger data breaches have occurred at other institutions, Sobota’s article includes several details that may make you think again:

“’In talking with the FBI and others, there have been five universities around the country that we know of’ where similar crimes have occurred, [ISU Chief of Staff Jay] Groves said. None of those other universities is in Illinois, he added.

“Such data breaches also have involved people filing fraudulent tax returns using the information they obtained to divert tax refunds, Groves said.”

Sobota’s complete article is available at: http://www.pantagraph.com/news/local/data-breach-results-in-misdirected-payroll-at-isu/article_71bdd022-90dd-5a2b-bd84-11467982b13c.html.

The graphs are from Cybersponse: Adaptive Security: https://cybersponse.com/blog.