Adam On…

Back in mid-February, Harvard University suffered a computer breach. Nothing earth shattering in this. After all, over 25 incidents had already occurred at colleges and universities in 2008 before the Harvard incident. Sure “kaboom73″ uploaded the files stolen from the Harvard server to a torrent on Pirate Bay. Then, a month later, Harvard announces that the stolen data contained information on 10,000 applicants.

All of this makes for a juicy story, I’ll admit. You’ve got a big name school, compromised site, mocking messages, p2p, Pirate Bay, thousands of individuals. However, is it “hundreds of news articles in the past week” juicy? Seriously, this story is showing up all over the place: Major news outlets. Local news outlets. Even international news outlets.

I’m still scratching my head over the reason for all the attention. After all, it isn’t the only or even first web site compromise of 2008. Nor is the Harvard incident the largest of 2008. There have been other internationally-known schools involved in breaches this year. Yet none of these other stories have garnered the news interest that the Harvard story has sparked. I guess the only thing I can say is that Harvard story has got legs.