Hackers hacked servers of more than 53 universities across the world including US universities like Harvard University, University of Pennsylvania and Stanford.

A hacking group calling itself Team GhostShell claimed responsibility for hacking the servers to show their frustration over increase in tuition fees and to raise awareness in education.

"We have set out to raise awareness towards the changes made in today's education, how new laws imposed by politicians affect us, our economy and overall, our way of life," the hackers posted a message.

As many as 120,000 records of e-mail addresses, names, passwords, phone number of students, faculty and staff were hacked and posted on the website, Pastebin.com.

"We tried to keep the leaked information to a minimum, so just around 120.000+ accounts and records are here, leaving in their servers hundreds of thousands more," the message said.

In some cases, the hackers are believed to have breached multiple servers of universities so as to get access to the confidential data. As many as seven servers of the University of Michigan were hacked.

Confidential details about the payroll of university employees were also published online, according to a report in The New York Times.

Servers of universities including New York, Rutgers, Duke, Cornell, Purdue, Princeton, Boston University and Johns Hopkins in the US, Imperial College London, Melbourne University, Tokyo University were all hacked by GhostShell team.

Identity Finder, a New York based firm that works to avoid identity theft, said in a blog post that the firm analyzed the data hacked and found at least 36,623 Unique Email Addresses and one bank account number were accessed. However, information such as social security numbers and credit card details were not exposed.

"Although the hackers claim to have posted 120,000 accounts, Identity Finder could only confirm around 40,000 accounts exposed. 40,000 accounts is still a large number, and it is possible that the hackers had access to far more," Aaron Titus, Chief Privacy Officer for Identity Finder, said in his post.

Lisa Ann Lapin, a spokeswoman for Stanford University, confirmed to the New York Times that two web sites belonging to the university's department had been accessed by the hackers, but said the servers have been secured.

"Our information security officers consider the breaches to be minor in nature," Lapin said. "No restricted or prohibited data was compromised, nor was any sensitive or other personal information that could lead to identity theft," she told NYT.