University of Idaho Announces Data Theft

Via spokesmanreview.com -

The names, addresses and Social Security numbers of about 70,000 students, faculty members and donors to the University of Idaho may have been stolen along with three computers over the Thanksgiving holiday, the university announced today.

The UI said it delayed announcing the information publicly at the request of police investigators, but is now notifying everyone whose personal information might have been accessed by the office where the burglary occurred.

The information was stored in databases used for a variety of purposes, from communicating with students and staff to contacting alumni for support. Christopher Murray, the UI’s vice president for advancement, said today that officials have no reports of the information being used fraudulently and believes the risk of that happening is “very, very small.”

Murray said that, while the UI can’t be sure about precisely what information was on the computers, the university has discovered that six months before the burglary, the stolen computers’ hard drives contained the names, addresses and Social Security numbers of about 70,000 people.

The university is notifying a much larger group of people whose information may have been accessed at any point by the office of Advancement Services – more than 331,000 people. The university is e-mailing a notice to Idaho residents and mailing notices to out-of-state residents in the database, and has set up a Web site to help people protect themselves, www.identityalert.uidaho.edu.