Personal information containing names, addresses, telephone numbers and bank account numbers used for paying tuition on all 110,000 students enrolled in Kanagawa prefectural senior high schools in fiscal 2006 was leaked–and remains–on the Internet because the involved parties have been unable to get it removed.
Last September, the board of education received a fax from an anonymous person, saying private information had been leaked on the Internet through file-sharing software.
The information mentioned in the fax turned out to be data that the board of education had provided to IBM Japan to develop a tuition collecting system.
IBM Japan said it was highly likely the information was leaked from a computer of an employee at another company, which IBM Japan had commissioned to help carry out the task. A virus that had infected the employee’s computer apparently released the information through the Winny file-sharing program.
Read more in the Asahi Shimbun
[headline typo corrected 8:50 am]