Despite having recently touted (and being criticized) for being discovered as having a network monitoring system from Fidelis CyberSecurity, and as the third breach in the past 5 years, now 80,000 current and former faculty, staff, students and vendors have been alerted starting Friday February 26, 2016 about a December 28, 2015 data breach of social security numbers and financial records including bank account numbers.

The intrusion occurred on the Berkeley Financial System, or BFS, a software used by UC Berkeley for financial management.  The breach itself affects over 50% of the current students and employees.

“We don’t see any evidence that this is the kind of attacker that actually did access the data or did anything to take that data from the system,” said campus Chief Information Security Officer Paul Rivers in a phone press conference Friday.

UC Berkeley doubled its cybersecurity budget in 2013 from $1.5M to $3M after its email system, CalNet, was taken over by hackers and used to house a phishing attack banking scam.