We’re all potential identity theft victims, but lately college students seem to be especially vulnerable. We’re only seven weeks into 2009, and already eight universities have reported data breaches that placed roughly 40,000 students’ personal information at risk.

The most recent university data breach occurred at the University of Alabama, and affected 37,000 students. UA officials sent out letters this week explaining that 17 of their 400 databases were accessed by hackers in November.

The information on those compromised databases included names, addresses, dates of birth, Social Security numbers, and lab results of people who had blood or urine testing done at the UA Medical Center as far back as 1994.

The other university data breaches include

University of Rochester
450 students
Hackers

University of Oregon
Number of students affected unknown
Stolen laptop

Southern Oregon Community College
200 students
Stolen laptop

Missouri State University
565 students
Email sent with student information mistakenly attached

Kansas State University
45 students
Student information mistakenly posted on Internet

Ball State University
19 students
Email sent with student information mistakenly attached

Purdue University
962
Tax forms mistakenly mailed to wrong recipients

Tags: data breach, hackers, identity theft protection, LifeLock, LifeLock promotion code, University of Alabama

This entry was posted on Wednesday, February 18th, 2009 at 11:32 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.