Dive Brief:
- Online security at Auburn University in Alabama was compromised recently, exposing more than 350,000 students, including those who never attended or applied to the school.
- AL.com reports the “security incident” included the online release of names, addresses, and social security numbers of students, but Auburn won’t say how it got all the personal information that was exposed.
- The university received some information from ACT and SAT for recruitment but that doesn’t explain the social security numbers, according to the article.
Dive Insight:
News of hackers accessing the personal information of millions of consumers seems to come in all the time. At Auburn, the student information was available online for about six months following a server issue before officials noticed it. The very intriguing part here is how Auburn got all the information that was available. Colleges and universities, like other businesses collecting such information, have a responsibility to protect the identities of their stakeholders. In this case, the university might consider a new system of destroying personal information of students outside its own community.