March 13th, 2008
Personal information of Harvard grad students compromised
Harvard’s graduate school of arts and sciences said that roughly 10,000 individuals may have had their personal information compromised by a security breach.
The intrusion was discovered in February, according to a Harvard statement released Wednesday. Of the 10,000 affected, 6,600 got a year’s worth of free credit monitoring because their Social Security numbers were exposed. That group also had “each applicant’s name, Social Security number, date of birth, address, e-mail address, phone numbers, test scores, previous school attended, and school records” exposed.
Harvard said:
A Harvard Graduate School of Arts and Sciences (GSAS) Web server that contained summaries of GSAS applicant data for entry to the Fall 2007 academic year, summaries of GSAS housing applicant data for the 2007-08 and 2006-07 academic years, and administrator information was hacked by an outsider and compromised in a way that the data on the server could have been viewed or copied. The GSAS site was taken down from Feb. 17 until Feb. 21 in order to investigate the incident and to improve security.
The university said an initial examination didn’t reveal the leakage of personal information, but a follow up did.
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