CUNY Data Breach Affects 23,000

Who Breached: City University of New York (CUNY)
Number Affected: 23,000
Information breached: Social Security Numbers
How: laptop theft

The City University of New York (CUNY) has notified 23,000 current and former students that their personal data has been breached following a laptop theft from a locked financial-aid office in Midtown.

CUNY sent letters to affected students on October 19th indicating the laptop was stolen around October 15th; representatives are not sure how access was gained to the secured room. Harvey Shifter, a spokesperson for CUNY’s Financial Aid office, said the laptop was non-functioning (a blue screen at activation) and password-protected. Despite this assurance, it is still possible to access the data via an external hard disk and to break the password.

Students were urged to contact their credit card companies and take other steps to protect their identities by initiating a fraud alert. No compensation is being offered in the form of credit monitoring services.

With no leads, the police have closed the case.

What is most worrying about this data breach is the response of school officials. It seems as though officials assume the data was safeguarded with a password.

Students have been unhappy with the response time of school officials in notifying them of the breach and in subsequent queries. Students have placed calls to the official noted in the breach notification that have gone unanswered.

Via SCMagazine, NY Post, the ticker Tags: cuny, data breach, city university of new york, data loss, identity theft, stolen laptop, laptop security