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On Friday morning, University of Pennsylvania alumni, students, staff, and community partners received several emails from hackers purporting to represent the university’s Graduate School of Education (GSE).
“We have terrible security practices and are completely unsophisticated,” read the email. “We love breaking federal rules like FERPA (all your data will be leaked).”
The message was sent from various Penn-approved email accounts, such as GSE, as well as several senior members of staff across the university.
Penn’s other associates received emails multiple times from different senders, including official ones @upenn.edu Email address (Disclosure: As a former student and former employee of the university, I have received messages on my personal email three times so far.)
Penn spokesman Ron Ozio told TechCrunch in an email Friday that the school’s incident response team is “proactively addressing the situation.”
“A hoax email has been circulated that appears to come from the Graduate School of Education at the University of Pennsylvania. It is clearly a fake, and highly offensive, hurtful message that does not reflect the mission or actions of Penn or Penn GSE,” Ozio said.
As the hackers clearly stated in their message (“Please stop giving us money”), the breach appears to be motivated to suppress alumni donations. Bhang also happens after university publicly rejected The White House offers to commit to the Trump administration’s political agenda in exchange for federal funding. Penn and Six other schools The White House rejected the offer.
The White House’s “Compact for Academic Excellence in Higher Education” calls on universities to scrap affirmative action in recruiting and admissions and to discipline departments that “deliberately punish, belittle and even incite violence against conservative ideas.”
Compact signatories would also freeze tuition for five years, offer tuition-free education to students studying the “hard sciences,” cap international undergrad enrollment at 15%, and require standardized tests such as the SAT for admission.
The compact mandates that schools implement policies that marginalize transgender and gender-nonconforming students.
“[The compact] Choice and mandate protections for the communication of conservative thought only,” Penn President J. Larry Jameson wrote in his op-ed. response to Education Secretary Linda McMahon, which was published on the university’s website.
Jameson writes, “The one-sided situation is at odds with the diversity of viewpoints and freedom of expression that are central to how universities contribute to democracy and society.”
