UNC-Charlotte Data Breaches Expose 350,000 SSN's & Much More

by Carol~ Moderator - 5/11/12 7:02 AM

In Reply to: NEWS - May 11, 2012 by Carol~ Moderator

Confidential data, including bank account and Social Security numbers for some 350,000 University of North Carolina-Charlotte students, staff and faculty, were accidentally exposed -- some for almost 15 years -- due to a system misconfiguration and incorrect access settings that made electronic data publicly available.

The school on Wednesday released a statement on an investigation it launched in February after staff discovered the data breach. The investigation revealed two separate incidents exposed data such as names, addresses, Social Security numbers and financial account information provided during university transactions.

One incident involved misconfigurations and incorrect access settings made during a general university system upgrade that left data stored on the university's H: drive exposed on the Internet from Nov. 9, 2011 to Jan. 31, 2012.

The second involved improperly stored sensitive data belonging to the school's College of Engineering that allowed for unauthorized access from 1997 until February 2012.

Continued : http://threatpost.com/en_us/blogs/unc-charlotte-data-breaches-expose-350000-social-security-numbers-and-much-more-051012

Also: UNC Charlotte: 350,000 SSNs Exposed in Decade-long Data Breach