Back to School and Data Breaches: Universities Continually Exposing Student Data

Written on August 26, 2011 – 8:30 am | by Brayden Lorenzini

After completing summer internships or working jobs for extra cash to get through the school year, most college students are excited to get back on campus and experience what many believe are the four best years in life. Well, it seems that as of late, many college students have had to worry about something else this time of year: their personal data being exposed by the higher learning institutions that are grooming them into being productive adults.

Recently, there have been some very stark real-life examples of data breaches at colleges and universities that may create long-term financial problems for students. Here they are:

Yale University Data Breach: Yale just notified about 43,000 faculty, staff, students and alumni that their names and Social Security numbers were publicly available via Google search for about 10 months. The breach resulted when a File Transfer Protocol (FTP) server on which the data was stored became searchable via Google.

The University of Wisconsin Milwaukee Data Breach: The University of Wisconsin Milwaukee recently went public with its efforts to contact about 75,000 people to let them know they may have had their names and Social Security numbers accessed by cyber thieves. Malware was found on university server housing software that managed confidential information for several departments.

Purdue University Data Breach: Last week, more than 7,000 former Purdue University students received letters telling them their Social Security numbers may have been accessed during a breach.

So, what’s going on here? It seems that nobody is immune to data breaches and colleges and universities have always (and will be) a target for cybercriminals.

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