Last week, a news stories published by CompterWorld was posted that the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill began notifying over 100,000 women about the possible exposure of their social security numbers and other personal information. A computer hacker has breached the university computer system and it has been found that these records were accessed. It is not believed at this time that the data has been downloaded or modified.

Only women are affected since the server only contained the information of those who participated in a federally funded mammography research project. The breach was first discovered back in July 2009 when an authorized user had trouble logging in to the system. The data has not been available online since that time.

The chairman of the Department of Radiology at the university, Matt Mauro, reveled that the breach was first discovered back in July 2009 when an authorized user had trouble logging in to the system.  “Though the breach was discovered in July, there are indications that the actual intrusion may have taken place as long as two years ago, Mauro said. “We think we found some viruses that date back to 2007,” he said.

Unfortunately, stories of this nature are being reported more often due to problems with limited or no security on the computer servers of schools, businesses, medical facilities, etc. If you have not become a victim of identity theft, take precautions to be sure that you do what you can to ensure that you monitor your credit closely in case of unauthorized activity on your account. Millions have no control over whether their social security number is accessed because it is kept on the computers of so many different places. How often they check their own credit files and report questionable activity is extremely important.

This entry was posted on Monday, September 28th, 2009 at 10:10 am 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.