A major university in Texas recently suffered a
data breach that exposed the personal information for more than 4,000 alumni as a result of a file being mistakenly attached to an email.
The email attachment contained the names, addresses, telephone numbers and Social Security numbers for thousands of alums who graduated prior to 1985 but had since requested copies of their transcripts, according to a report from the
Bryan-College Station Eagle. The person who received the attachment immediately notified the university about the mistake.
"Even though we believe this incident puts these former students at low risk of
identity theft, we will notify those individuals affected, as required by university rules and state laws," said Pierce Cantrell, Texas A&M's vice president and associate provost for information technology, according to the newspaper. "We deeply regret this happened, and have taken immediate action to restrict access to this file."
Ondrej Krehel, chief information security officer of Identity Theft 911, writes regularly on his blog about the threats consumers face from
data breaches, accidental and otherwise.
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