The cyberattack that caused a widespread shutdown of Columbia University’s computer systems last week appears to be the work of a “hacktivist” — a hacker who also stole student data with the apparent goal of furthering a political agenda, a Columbia official said on Tuesday.
During the outage, which began on June 24, a smiling image of President Trump appeared on some computer screens at the university, including on public monitors in the student center. The Columbia official, who was not authorized to speak publicly, did not provide a motivation for the attack.
But Bloomberg News, which received messages from the apparent hacker, said that the person described stealing student data in order to see if Columbia was using affirmative action in its admission policies, a practice the Supreme Court effectively barred in 2023.
A cyber-forensics firm hired by the university reported that the hack appeared to be highly sophisticated and targeted in its theft of documents, the official said. The official added that Columbia had not yet determined the scope of the data theft and that it could take weeks to months to do so. Columbia’s websites and internal systems, however, which went down during the attack, were up and running again within a week.
The person who communicated with Bloomberg News provided it with 1.6 gigabytes of data representing 2.5 million student applications to Columbia dating back decades. The data included students’ and applicants’ university-issued identification numbers, their citizenship status, the decisions made on their applications and the academic programs to which they applied, among other information.
Bloomberg reported that it was able to confirm the accuracy of the data for eight Columbia students and alumni who applied to the university between 2019 and 2024.
The apparent hacker declined to provide their name to Bloomberg, saying they did not want to go to prison. The New York Times could not independently verify the hacker’s claims.
The hacker also told Bloomberg that the records were part of approximately 460 gigabytes of extracted data they had stolen detailing financial aid packages, employee pay and at least 1.8 million Social Security numbers belonging to employees, applicants, students and their family members. The person told Bloomberg News that they had acquired the data after having access to Columbia’s servers for more than two months.
The university is in the midst of trying to negotiate a settlement with the Trump administration to unfreeze more than $400 million in federal funding for research, which the administration pulled over its claims that Columbia had not done enough to protect Jewish students from antisemitic harassment. Claire Shipman, the university’s acting president, said in a letter in June that the university was “in danger of reaching a tipping point in terms of preserving our research excellence and the work we do for humanity.”
Columbia was attacked about a week after its chief information officer, Gaspare LoDuca, announced that he was leaving the university and joining M.I.T. as its vice president for information systems and technology. Over his 10-year tenure at Columbia, Mr. LoDuca oversaw all information technology systems, including cybersecurity, The Columbia Spectator reported.
Sharon Otterman is a Times reporter covering higher education, public health and other issues facing New York City.
The post Columbia Cyberattack Appears Politically Motivated, University Says appeared first on New York Times.
