Another School Exposes Private Information

DutchSter writes "In the wake of other schools announcing the theft of hardware containing sensitive student information, Miami University, of Oxford, Ohio, has announced that a file containing the name, Social Security number, the grade point average for the Fall 2002 semester, cumulative grade point average, and other related academic information, such as credit hours attempted that semester, for all 21,000 students who attended the Fall 2002 term has been available on a web server for the last three years. The discovery was made this week and the university is taking steps to deal with the fall-out sure to come."

Comments

Re:Miami University, of Oxford, Ohio

[Adam9]

We were here first :P

Explanation

[Mr. Underbridge]

You can joke, but Miami were a group of native Americans indigenous to the midwest, including Ohio. A river in the area is also named after the tribe, and has been for hundreds of years.

The city in Florida sprung up at the end of the 1800s, and adopted the name because they thought it meant something vaguely pleasant regarding water.

So if anybody's ignorant, it's actually the clowns in Florida.

Re:Who are they hiring?

[kdawgud]

I got some inside information on the real story...

Apparantly there's this list of all the students academic info that's sent out to all the Deans each semester. One of the Deans gave it to another professor for whatever reason and that professor accidently puts it on a public drive and forgets about it for 3 years.

Nice. Real nice.

Re:TFA from a MU Grad who Just got Notice

[shancock]

Before you start blaming every CS student maybe you should read the full explanation on their site, which among other things says:

"On Monday, September 12, 2005, Miami University became aware that a grade report from the Fall 2002 semester had been unwittingly placed by a now-retired faculty member into a file that was accessible via the Internet.

Note the 'retired faculty member'. Not a student or a hacker.

This seems like a common problem, how does one protect again appending sensitive information from a protected document into an ordinary text or non-sensitive file? Is there a technology out there that can mark the data so it can not be copied into another file even though it is accessible to some. Apparently the 'now retired faculty member' had access to the file. Probably used cut and paste to imbed it into a file he/she could access from home/laptop etc. We had lots of problems like this at government locations I worked at

I understand your anger but this does not seem to be a malicious act, it appears to be an honest screw up and is not like the stupidity of Citibank sending their files via un-encrypted tapes by UPS.

The school seems to be handling this OK.

Re:My SSN is stolen - I can't party anymore!

[Locke03]

It's named after the Miami tribe of Native Americans who used to live in the area. I go there, and yeah it's a joke. I'm just there because it's somewhere close while I decide where I want to really go. Wasn't always like that though, and to all the Miami Flordia people, Miami U was a school before Flordia was a state.

Peace

P.S.
yay, my first post!!