Social Security numbers and names of 61,709 students who applied to, attended, or graduated from Sonoma State University from 1995 to 2002 have been exposed by an unauthorized access to seven campus workstations.
Files involving faculty data from 1999-2005 were also breached. The security breach came from an outside source and was contained as soon as it was discovered. No central servers were affected.
There was no indication that any of the personal information was accessed. However, to be safe, the campus is notifying those whose data was contained in the compromised files through existing e-mail addresses.
But, for those whom the University has no reliable address, the administration is soliciting help from media throughout the state to alert others who are possibly vulnerable to the breach.
A complete list of categories of those affected, as well as recommendations for handling identity-theft concerns, can be found at a Web site established at http://www.sonoma.edu/uaffairs/incident.
University officials are encouraging those whose data may have been exposed in the breach to contact one of the three national credit-reporting agencies to initiate a free fraud-alert process.
