The hacker group Team Ghostshell has published 120,000 records from nearly 100 worldwide universities protesting against the rise in tuition fees and a decline in the education quality under a project group calls ‘Project WestWind’.
According to the hackers’ team, the information was leaked in an attempt to create awareness towards the changes made in existing education procedures, the effect of new laws imposed by politicians on people, economy and overall way of life.
The leaked information was obtained by raiding servers at institutions that include Princeton, Harvard, Cambridge and Imperial College London, in addition to universities in Moscow, Rome and Tokyo.
The leaked data comprises email addresses, passwords, students and faculty names, event schedules, and secret information.
The hackers also revealed that many of the university systems that they gained access to were already riddled with malware.
The dumped files include URLs to PHP-scripted pages on websites of aimed institutions, as well as with the contents of SQL tables, signifying that the extraction of information involved SQL injection attacks.
Earlier in August 2012, GhostShell leaked documents and data obtained from major US organisations including government agencies, banks, consulting firms and accounts of politicians.
