Columbia University’s computer systems were shut down last week by a “hacktivist” motivated by furthering a political agenda, a Columbia official confirmed to the New York Times on Tuesday.
The outages, which started on June 24, caused a smiling image of US President Donald Trump to appear across monitors on campus.
The hacker had allegedly stolen student data to see if Columbia was using affirmative action in its admissions process, according to Bloomberg News.
A cyber forensics firm hired by Columbia reportedly found that the hack was highly sophisticated and targeted documents, the official told the NYT. The scope of the theft has yet to be understood, though the person who communicated with Bloomberg News proved at least 1.6 gigabytes of data representing 2.5 million student applications were accessed.
Mamdani identified as 'Black or African American' in Columbia admissions
The hacktivist also shared documents with the NYT, revealing that New York mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani had identified as “Black or African American,” as well as “Asian.”
Mamdani, 33, confirmed on Thursday that he did not identify as Black or African-American but rather “an American who was born in Africa.”
“Most college applications don’t have a box for Indian-Ugandans, so I checked multiple boxes trying to capture the fullness of my background,” Mamdani told the NYT.
“Even though these boxes are constraining, I wanted my college application to reflect who I was,” he added.
Both Mamdani’s parents were born in India, though he was born in Uganda. His father’s family came to East Africa more than 100 years ago, he claimed.