Seen on The Wesleyan Argus: When Information Technology Services (ITS) switched Wesleyan’s e-mail to Gmail in January of this year, students were able to log into other students’ e-mails for about a month by typing in a username and leaving the password field blank. This glitch has been but one of a multitude of issues…
Category: Education Sector
City of Lawrence to pay for credit monitoring for snooping victims
Jill Harmacinski of The Eagle-Tribune reports that the city of Lawrence (Massachusetts) will be paying for free credit reports for more than 400 people subjected to questionable background checks by the School Department. Officials are now trying to figure out how many of the more than 400 background checks were actually legitimate checks for School…
Personal info of 18,000 Nashville students exposed on the web (updated)
The Associated Press reports that the Tennessee Department of Education has announced that a private contractor, Public Consulting Group, accidentally exposed personal information of more than 18,000 Nashville public school students and 6,000 of their parents on the web from December 28 through March 31, when the problem was discovered by a parent. Information on…
6,000 University of Washington employees’ personal information on hacked servers
Nick Perry of The Seattle Times reports that 6,000 University of Washington employees were notified last week that their names and Social Security numbers were on a computer system that was hacked. At least two parking-management computer servers were hacked starting around Dec. 6 last year. The university recognized that the servers had been compromised…
NZ: Privacy authority joins inquiry
Janine Rankin reports: The Privacy Commission will investigate how schools released schoolgirls’ contact details as part of the HPV (human papilloma virus) vaccination programme. The programme’s planned to continue next year to reach another three year groups, and in future will be routine for Year 8s. Assistant privacy commissioner Katrine Evans said getting the process…
Ohio University Closes Door on Breach Saga With $90,000 Settlement
Steve Kolowich reports: Ohio University has settled a lawsuit with two former information-technology administrators, paying them a total of $90,000 because the university improperly failed to disclose some records related to an investigation of a data breach three years ago. Thus concludes a saga fraught with litigation, finger-pointing, and the perils of technology. Read more…