Ohio dental school reveals data breach

The Ohio State University (OSU) College of Dentistry is among more than 50 universities worldwide recovering from a recent data breach.

On October 1, hackers stole the names, addresses, phone numbers, email addresses, and passwords of more than 600 people who are affiliated with the dental school and released the information on the Internet, according to a story in the campus newspaper, the Lantern.

The security breach was quickly spotted and no restricted data were taken from the system, a school official told the paper.

Ohio law only requires data breach notification if the compromised data could lead to identity theft, and the data taken in this incident didn't pose that threat because it was 5-year-old, nonrestricted data from the dental school, he noted.

OSU was among several universities attacked by TeamGhostShell, which posted an online statement explaining the purpose of the hack was to "raise awareness towards the changes made in today's education."

The hackers hit at least 116 servers across 53 institutions, including Tokyo University, the University of Berlin, University of Michigan, John Hopkins, and Imperial College London.

OSU is investigating the incident and has removed the hacked server from service.