11/25/2025
The season of heists has gone digital.
Harvard, Princeton, and UPenn were hit by rapid hacks that tricked staff and exposed databases full of personal info on donors, students, alumni, and other high-profile figures.
The motive isn’t clear, but the timing is rough. The Trump administration is already pressuring universities on antisemitism complaints, DEI programs, admissions, tuition, and even freezing research funding — making a cybersecurity mess even more costly.
What links the breaches: speed, scale, and high-prestige targets. The stolen data ranges from academic and demographic records to health and financial aid details, opening the door to identity theft or doxxing. And with one hacker calling Penn “woke” and threatening to sell its data, the political undertones aren’t subtle.
