Employees at the University of Chicago recently learned that the school made a massive error that could result in
identity theft.
A mailing error led the school to expose the Social Security numbers for more than 9,100 employees, according to a report from the University of Chicago's student newspaper,
the Maroon. In sending out a postcard reminder for those employees to re-enroll in school-offered health benefits, it printed their Social Security numbers right below their addresses. The postcards were not in envelopes.
The school has already alerted the employees to the mistake and apologized, giving them information on how to protect their identities from fraud, the report said. Further, it is offering a year of free credit monitoring to all the victims of the breach.
Ondrej Krehel, the chief information security officer for Identity Theft 911, has a blog about the ways both organizations and consumers can increase their levels of protection from the effects of a
data breach, and steps they can take to make sure they're not affected when these incidents do happen.
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