Official NSU statement on Facebook site

NORFOLK, Va. (WAVY) - Norfolk State University is committed to maintaining a secure and productive educational environment for its students, faculty, staff, and neighboring community. On December 2, University officials were informed of a bogus Facebook site which contained unauthorized materials from certain NSU students’ Facebook accounts.

“We are saddened and deeply troubled that someone would use a popular networking and communication tool, such as Facebook, and turn it into a vehicle to ridicule our students. This is unacceptable,” said Dr. Kim Luckes, acting President of Norfolk State University. “In this era of constant social networking and immediate access to one’s information online, it is critical that we increase our awareness of how our personal information can potentially be used.”

The incident was immediately turned over to the Norfolk State University Police Department and the University’s Information Security Team for further investigation.

To help combat this action, Norfolk State University’s Information Security Team is petitioning Facebook to disable and remove the bogus site and will continue to do so until immediate action is taken. Students should know that they have the power to stop such unauthorized use of their Facebook materials by lodging complaints with the networking and communication site. Students are urged to petition Facebook to disable and remove the site. University officials have provided the necessary steps for students to follow and lodge their complaints. Further, the University’s Information Security Team was immediately mobilized to assess any potential system threats and found that the University's computer network system was not compromised by this incident.

University officials have also issued reminders to NSU students about Internet safety and protecting their privacy. Students have been advised, through a campus wide announcement, to be careful about posting personal information on public newsgroups, public chat groups, community websites and private or commercial online sites which may be accessible by anyone on the Internet. The announcement also noted that personal information may be indexed and cached by search engines such as Google or Yahoo and can remain available on search engines even after the original website has removed the information.

The entire University community was advised to report any incidents of this nature to the NSU Police Department and the University’s Information Security Team immediately.