Catherine Cruz reports:
University of Hawaii officials are warning that confidential financial information of close to 2,000 people is unaccounted for.
The documents were in three file boxes kept in a secured area on the Diamond Head campus.
“It’s scary because someone could be using your credit card and you wouldn’t know,” said Sepe Albert, a freshman who was on campus for orientation Friday.
Somewhere on the Kapiolani Kapiolani College campus is a locked storage area where sensitive financial files are kept until they can be destroyed.
Officials said that on July 1st, a worker who went into the area noticed that boxes weren’t in their proper order.
“It was initially thought they might have been misplaced, and it didn’t look like a theft, so the campus started its own investigation,” said UH spokeswoman Lynne Waters
When the boxes couldn’t be found, KCC officials called in police and a private investigator on July 8.
No one is sure how long the documents were unaccounted for.Officials said documents contain names, addresses, social security numbers and, or credit card numbers.
Read more on KITV.
This is not the University of Hawaii’s first data breach. Nor its second. Nor its third….. nor its fifth. Last year, the state legislature held hearings after the Liberty Coalition pointed fingers at UH claiming that they accounted for over half of all data breaches in the state. That should not, of course, be confused with accounting for over half of all ID theft or fraudulent charges, as it’s not clear whether even a single case of fraud has been linked to any of their big breaches.
Kapiolani Community College also reported a breach in 2009.