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Bracket Madness of a Different Sort: Firm Scores University Breaches

13.03.2012
For millions of Americans, March means brackets—the kind found in the NCAA men's basketball tournament—but for the threat watchers at Application Security's TeamShatter, it means brackets of a different kind: breach brackets.

In the spirit of "March Madness," the security firm puts together its brackets for colleges that lost the most data due to breaches in the previous year.

Ironically, the school that stood alone at the top of TeamShatter's breach brackets fielded last year's Cinderella team in the real NCAA basketball tournament: Virginia Commonwealth, which went from a 11th seed to the Final Four.

In 2011, , VCU suffered the largest data breach of any U.S. institution of higher learning when hackers, on November 11, compromised 176,567 records containing personal information about current and former VCU and VCU Health System faculty, staff, students and affiliates.

The data breaches at the other members of the "Final Four" didn't even come close to VCU. Wisconsin Milwaukee, which VCU beat out for the title, had a 79,000 record breach; Yale, 43,000 records; and South Carolina, 31,000 records.

According to TeamShatter, VCU was the 21st school of higher learning to suffer a breach of more than 100,000 records since 2005. Throughout the years, the winners of the threat firm's exercise in bracketology have included some basketball powerhouses, such as Ohio State (2010), North Carolina (2009) and UCLA (2006).