Nearly 500 applicants to the University of California-Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism might be at risk of identity theft after an online security breach, the Daily Californian reports.
Computer security experts realized in July that a hacker had entered a private segment of the school's Web server and might have accessed sensitive information, including the names and corresponding Social Security numbers of individuals who applied to the school between September 2007 and May 2009. Campus security officials say there is no indication that the sensitive information was stolen or misused.
"In an abundance of caution, we're going to be notifying those people that the potential exists that some of their information was exposed," says Shelton Waggener, the campus's associate vice chancellor for information technology and chief information officer. "We could not find any indication that that had actually occurred."
Waggener added that the campus network is bombarded with about 3 million attacks each day and that the university works tirelessly to determine if any attacks result in actual breaches of the system. The last major breach of the campus network took place in April 2009 and compromised the personal data of about 160,000 students, alumni, and university-affiliated individuals.
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