Harvard is a private Ivy League research university with over 20,000 faculty and staff, over 24,500 undergraduate and graduate students, and more than 400,000 alumni worldwide. As the university discovered on November 18, 2025, the attackers gained access to the personal information of students, alumni, donors, staff, and faculty members, including email addresses, telephone numbers, home and business addresses, event attendance records, donation details, and "biographical information pertaining to University fundraising and alumni engagement activities." However, Klara Jelinkova, Harvard's Vice President and University Chief Information Officer (CIO), said the breached IT systems didn't store Social Security numbers, passwords, payment card information, or financial information.
Although Harvard has not attributed the attack to a specific hacking group or threat actor, the ShinyHunters extortion gang claimed responsibility and said it stole over 1 million records containing identifiable information and donation data after breaching the university's systems. Two other Ivy League schools, Princeton University and the University of Pennsylvania, disclosed data breaches in November 2025, both confirming that the attackers accessed donors' information.
