More than 525,000 people affected by massive data breach at the University of Copenhagen
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- The University of Copenhagen reveals a breach that exposes personal data of more than 525,000 people
- The stolen information included names, national identification numbers, contact details and some campus access PINs.
- The university contained the incident, reported it to regulators and warned users about phishing risks.
The University of Copenhagen in Denmark has confirmed having suffered a cyber attack and having lost sensitive data of more than half a million people.
In a notification posted on the organization’s website, it was said that anonymous attackers gained access to one of its test environments and, from there, obtained full names, national identity numbers (CPR), phone numbers and email addresses of about 525,000 people.
A later update to the announcement added another 20,000 employees and students, whose PIN codes were apparently exposed.
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Phishing risks
The university responded by restricting physical access to critical locations on campus and then redistributing new access codes. Subsequently, the premises gradually reopened. Meanwhile, the university’s IT team contained the attack and prevented further incursions and said there was no evidence of any further compromise or disruption of other systems.
The incident was then reported to the Danish Data Protection Agency and, as it falls under the jurisdiction of the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), the university was investigating its next steps.
Universities and other educational institutions possess the type of information that cybercriminals consider quite valuable. Contact information, combined with private information that not many people know, is the type of data that threat actors can use to create personalized, personalized phishing emails.
These emails can trick victims into downloading data-stealing malware or granting access to systems where a ransomware deployment could be devastating.
For example, cybercriminals were seen sending emails to students telling them that their email address should be removed because it had not been used for a while. Students were given a short period of time (usually 24 hours or less) to “confirm their identity” or risk losing their email address, all emails stored there, as well as their entire contact list. Obviously, that risk was never real. Victims who wanted to “confirm” their identity were redirected to a fake Microsoft 365 login page which, if they attempted to log in, simply passed the credentials on to the attackers.
A long list of victims
The list of universities your data goes to is long and constantly growing. In early November 2025, the University of Pennsylvania confirmed that hackers broke into and stole files from its system.
They tricked an employee into sharing a PennKey SSO account, giving them access to the university’s VPN, Salesforce data, the Qlik analytics platform, SAP’s business intelligence system, and SharePoint files. Using that access, they stole data on approximately 1.2 million students, alumni, and donors, including names, dates of birth, addresses, phone numbers, estimated net worth, donation history, and demographic details.
Just two weeks later, Princeton University suffered the same fate. In a data breach notification letter sent to an undisclosed number of people, the University said the threat actors accessed an Advancement database belonging to the Ivy League institution, where they were able to access information about alumni, donors, some faculty, students, parents and other members of the organization.
The compromised database contained personally identifiable information such as names, email addresses, telephone numbers, and residential and business addresses. The database also contained information on fundraising activities and donations made to the university.
Even earlier, in mid-2025, the infamous ShinyHunters threat actors broke into Canvas (a learning management system) and through it, stole data from the world’s top universities, including Harvard, Oxford, and MIT. Stanford, Princeton, Columbia, Cambridge, Cornell, Berkeley, and Georgetown were said to have been compromised at the same time. The attackers then said they had attacked more than 8,800 educational institutions in 10 different countries, including the United States, Australia, the United Kingdom and Sweden.
The University of Copenhagen now urges its students, staff and partners to be careful with incoming emails.
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