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Malware put more than 3,000 University of Alberta faculty, staff and students at risk late last year, but because of a police probe resulting in charges against a student, the breach wasn’t shared campus-wide until Thursday.

The case involved the installation of malware on 300 computers in 20 classrooms and labs in the Library Knowledge Commons, Computing Science Centre and in the Centennial Centre for Interdisciplinary Science, Gordie Mah, the university’s chief information security officer, told a news conference Thursday at the U of A.

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The malware was designed to harvest the university’s primary identification password, known as the campus computing ID.

“That’s the gateway to the university’s email service, for example,” Mah said, adding it could lead to the disclosure of unauthorized personal or financial information.

“This particular malware requires the individual to be physically present at the machine,” he said. “That’s the only barrier to how much further it could have spread.”

Mah noted there hasn’t been a data breach of this scale at the university in recent memory. He recommended people change their passwords often and avoid opening attachments or links from suspicious emails.