ID theft risk: Data breaches at colleges and universities
There were three reported data breaches at institutions of higher learning in the United States last month, making November a relatively uneventful month for data breaches. I say relatively uneventful because there have been 72 data breaches so far this year at colleges and universities—an average of more than six a month so far this year.
There were also fewer records exposed than in many other months, with a total of only 5,409; that compares well to October when there were more than twice that number of records exposed in a total of seven reported breaches.
The November data breaches bring the total number of reported exposed records to 868,286. The actual total is much higher than that, though; 11 of the incidents were reported with an “unknown” number of records exposed, and in one incident the number of exposed records was reported as “thousands.”
- 11/1—Bloomsburg University of Pennsylvania, Bloomsburg, PA
- 574 records exposed
- Stolen laptop
- Names, Social Security numbers and grades of students enrolled in a psychology class taught by Julie Kontos between Summer 2004 and Spring 2006 were stored on the laptop stolen from a university office.
- 11/6—Chaminade University, Honolulu, HI
- 4,500 records exposed
- Erroneous Internet posting
- Names and Social Security numbers of undergraduate students enrolled between 1997 and 2006 when an internal report was inadvertently posted in March of this year on a publicly accessible website.
- 11/15—California State Polytechnic University, Pomona, CA
- 355 records exposed
- Erroneous Internet posting
- Names and Social Security numbers of university applicants from 2003 remained on a publicly accessible website from November 2003 to November 2008. The file was removed from the website last year, but remained in search engine caches and indexes and so was still accessible until November 2009. The error was discovered by a former student when he found his own university records online with a simple Google search.
Tags: Bloomsburg University of Pennsylvania, California State Polytechnic University, Chaminade University, data breach, data breaches, SEI