Over 8,100 affected as HK college falls victim to cyber attack

The Hong Kong College of Technology has fell victim to hackers in February, with the number of people affected having increased to over 8,100 as of Friday.

The Office of the Privacy Commissioner for Personal Data said they were notified of the cyber attack in late February, with the college reporting that its information technology network and file server was hacked.

The latest information indicates that over 8,100 individuals are affected by the cyber attack, with their personal information such as names, HKID numbers, email addresses, mobile phone numbers, and addresses compromised.

It is understood that the ransomware group got hold of 450GB of the college's data. The information was made public on the dark web on Tuesday and has been accessed at least 10,000 times.

The college said the cyber attack was a highly targeted and unusual one. It also condemns any cyber crimes and deeply apologizes for any inconvenience and troubles caused by the incident.

The affected system has been shut down and the school has since launched a probe with the help of independent cyber security experts.

It added that it will provide credit monitoring and dark web monitoring services to those affected for half a year at no cost.

Commenting on the incident, the Education Bureau urged the college to comprehensively investigate the incident and to take appropriate measures to strengthen network security to prevent further and similar attacks.

Police investigation is ongoing and no arrests have been made so far.