Hackers have caused a major headache for Northwest Florida State College this week, exposing data for hundreds of thousands of students, faculty and staff.
The incident exposed more than 200,000 records that included names, dates of birth, and Social Security numbers, according to
a memo from NFSC president Ty Handy to school employees. Those affected were students eligible for Bright Futures scholarships from the state between 2005 and 2007. Another 3,000 employee records, and 76,000 student records containing other personally identifying information were also exposed.
"We speculate this was a professional, coordinated attack by one or more hackers," Handy wrote. "We believe that the hackers are having to do specific work to pull together enough information about an individual employee to steal their identity."
The school did not wait the requisite 45 days to alert those affected by the breach, and instead did so as soon as it had enough information, the report said.
Ondrej Krehel, the chief information security officer for
Identity Theft 911, writes often about the ways in which organizations of all kinds can do more to protect the sensitive data they store.
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