Many colleges and universities nationwide have been found to have either leaked private information or had their computer hacked. Some have found to have this information leaked via the internet, such as the following incident:

The personal records of over 1,000 current and former students of Southwest Mississippi Community College were made available on the internet due to a computer server crash. This was not an intentional breach. The names, social security numbers, addresses, genders, races and grade point averages were involved. Those who have been affected will be contacted by the college to get assistance with credit monitoring.

The amount of money and time lost by these schools that is used to inform affected individuals is in the thousands. Those who are affected also have to invest money and time into trying to undo any harm done by identity thieves.

A large target of identity thieves are students. Since they don’t often check their own credit, they are the perfect target for these criminals.

This entry was posted on Monday, October 20th, 2008 at 12:47 pm and is filed under Data Breach. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.