Michigan State University is one of the largest public colleges in Michigan. It's located in East Lansing and serves more than 40,000 students each semester. This large university manages countless student files and holds personal data for most of its students. That's why it's upsetting to learn that MSU students have likely experienced a serious data loss caused by the MOVEit data breaches.
The Michigan State University data breach occurred because the National Student Clearinghouse used the MOVEit file transfer tool. The tool suffered from a security issue that enabled hackers to access any file databases connected to it. This vulnerability led to countless schools and businesses being breached, and staggering data losses occurred, impacting millions of people around the world.
It's likely that the breach impacted MSU occurred on May 30 and May 31. These are the days that most of the MOVEit data breaches took place, and many students from other schools lost data when the National Student Clearinghouse was hacked near the end of May and the beginning of June.
Thousands of Michigan State University students and millions of other students throughout the country were likely impacted by this data breach. The breach is a wide-scale problem that's causing student data from around the country to be lost to the C10P ransomware gang.
We don't know how many MSU-related files were taken in this data breach. We only know that the number of files taken from the National Student Clearinghouse was substantial and that a huge number of students must take action to protect themselves now.