By Madison Brown |Editor in Chief 
Augusta University President Brooks Keel released a statement on Thursday, Aug. 18, revealing that AU faced cyberattacks twice in the past year—in September 2017 and last month.The first incident occurred on Sept. 10 and 11 of last year. The university discovered that an unauthorized user was able to gain access to AU email accounts. This may have given them access to personal and protected health information of approximately 417,000 individuals.“PHI, or protected health information, typically relates to information associated with the patients’ medical record,” Keel said. “It may be a diagnosis, it may be a medical record number or something associated with that. And this personal identification information, or PII, that typically refers to another number that is unique to that individual like a social security number or a driver’s license number.”According to a press release issued by Keel, external cybersecurity forces were able to determine that while there was personal and protected health information in the emails that were compromised, there has been no misuse of personal information as of this point.Keel said that out of 417,000 email accounts that were compromised, the university has contact information for almost 170,000 of those and are in the process of notifying the individuals about the incident.Maggie Cluney, a sophomore computer science major with a focus in cybersecurity, talked about the timing of the breaches and how they affect the reputation of the new cyber school."It's embarrassing to all the students that are getting cyber certificates or even upcoming students because AU will be recognized because of this event. Later, when we are trying to get jobs, our future employers will see Augusta University and we will be known for going to a school that wants to be the best cyber school in the nation and then still faced two major cybersecurity breaches," Cluney said.The university president also mentioned that there are different ways for concerned individuals to contact the school and receive more information about the incidents.“We have set up a notification webpage on our site at augusta.edu/notice and we encourage folks to go there,” he said. “We have call center already activated from 9 a.m. to 9 p.m. and individuals are encouraged to call that call center and receive any information that we can provide.”In the press release, Keel mentioned the precautions that he, along with AU’s IT Security team have been making to ensure that an attack like this doesn’t happen again.“We have made some personnel changes in compliance and risk management and also in cybersecurity and information technology,” he said. “We have already begun to implement a number of technology changes to try to make us more secure from a cybersecurity point of view.”The AU president also offered his apologies to anyone that may have had their information compromised in the attacks.“It’s one of those situations that we deeply regret this happening, and I want to personally offer my apologies to anyone and anybody whose personal information might have been compromised by this,” he said. Contact Madison at madbrown@augusta.edu or bellringerproduction@gmail.com