Identity Theft from University Computers

Different River writes "Someone broke into the administrative computers at George Mason University and accessed personal information, including social security numbers, of 30,000 students, faculty, and staff. "Before the hacking, the university was in the process of replacing students' Social Security numbers with other internal numbers to protect against identity theft." Looks like they just missed it."

Comments

This just goes to show....

[ecammit]

This just goes to show why using social security numbers for identification purposes is a bad idea. It always disturbs me how many places actually have that number. It was supposed to really be a secret number to identify your for social security, not everyday identification.

I'm less worried over this..

[Tracer_Bullet82]

than from internal threats.

How many cases of internal theft do we know?

As someone who once created and maintained my high school information database, I know how easy the system can be abused.

What's very imporant is that Universities have strict and applied policies dealing with information and database handling.Limiting the numbers that have access is paramount.
Background checks for personnel involved should be done too.