China Allegedly Is Embedded in Penn State’s Engineering Computers

The sports school, which also develops sensitive technology for the Navy, says hackers have been spying on the computers of its engineering institution for more than two years. Two separate groups – one from China and the other an unidentified nation state-sponsored entity – are attacking.

The FBI notified the university about the breach in November 2014.

“That the hackers were in the network undetected for more than two years raises the possibility that they used connections between computers to move into more highly guarded networks, including defense contractors, government agencies or the Navy, according to the person familiar with the investigation,” according to Bloomberg.

Penn State’s research on aerospace engineering, in particular, has both commercial and defense applications important to China’s government.

The engineering school’s network will be taken offline for several days while investigators try to eradicate the trespassers.

Penn State’s Applied Research Laboratory is one of 14 research centers around the nation that work mainly for the military. While the lab is not part of the College of Engineering, experts there are investigating whether the hackers could have moved there.

The university has notified 500 partners -- companies, government agencies and other universities -- of the breach. It has also notified 18,000 students and professors whose personal data, including Social Security numbers, were stored on one of the compromised computers.