More than 6.6 million personal records have been hacked in 435 incidences at colleges and universities since 2005, according to the Identity Theft Resource Center, an organization that recommends strategies for securing personal information.
Repeated IT breaches have cost technology officials and professors their jobs this decade. Two Ohio University IT employees were fired in 2006 after five separate security breaches that exposed hundreds of thousands of student files. The school’s CIO later resigned. In 2007, a Western Oregon University journalism professor was fired when officials discovered he did not secure a computer file containing his students’ names, grades, and Social Security numbers.
Some schools, such as Binghamton University in New York, have seen identity protection failures publicized several times in recent months. A Binghamton student in March found an unlocked room full of parents’ tax documents, and a photographer from a local news radio station took pictures of the exposed documents and posted them on a web site, redacting sensitive information. Just one month later, Social Security documents were found in a dumpster outside the university’s library. Thousands of Binghamton students signed a petition for the school to fire its information security director.
The recent spate of campus computer network breaches, Levin said, could make colleges vulnerable to legal action by students, faculty, alumni, or donors whose personal information has been stolen.
“I think people are getting sufficiently terrified about what they’re seeing,” he said. “Someday, somewhere, someone is going to go after a university [legally].”
Links:
- Lawmakers to colleges: No more social media prying - April 25, 2013
- Number of college applications affected by social media triples - October 9, 2012
- Gates Foundation supports college readiness apps - September 28, 2012