Yale Continues to Fuck Up, Loses 10,000+ SSNs
They say 80 percent of success is just showing up, but in the age of the hacker, it might be closer to 100. According to Yale officials in the Yale Daily News, the social security numbers for more than 10,000 current and former students, faculty and staff were compromised last month following the theft of two university computers.
In case you were wondering, the computers were stolen from the Yale College Dean's Office -- hey, did someone forget to lock the door? -- on July 17. Apparently the 'puters were password-protected, but we're hedging our bets that the password is "h@rv@rd$uck$01" or something. Yale says the computers were probably stolen to be sold, as if the computers in university administrative offices are worth far more than the MacBook Pros and the Dell XPS laptops that students regularly leave lying around campus.
Um, yeah. Oh, and the kicker?
"The lost files had not been maintained for any purpose," Yale spokesman Tom Conroy said in the Yale Daily News, "but were overlooked in the University's efforts at reducing the amount of personal information it holds."
Um, nice work, guys. Spring cleaning ended months ago. Of course, Yale sent out letters warning individuals to check bank and credit reports, but chances are whoever made off with the numbers -- which probably includes Aleksey Vayner's and suddenly justifies the theft -- is already high-tailin' it for the border...or Cambridge. (Or Princeton?) -- ANDREW NUSCA
6 Comments | 
Digg This | 
Share on Facebook | 
Print This Post | 
Email This Post
Read more: 1337 HAXX0RS, aleksey vayner, guest editors, Harvard, Princeton, privacy issues, stolen computers, stolen social security numbers, Yale
Email – 
Search
About
Report a bug
Archives
RSS Feed
August 8th, 2007 at 11:48 pm
This is happening more and more frequently. I’m 90% convinced that it’s an act of the Chinese government. Commies.
August 9th, 2007 at 10:53 am
couldn’t have a yale post without an aleksey vayner reference, could we?
August 9th, 2007 at 11:31 am
awww, fuck.
August 9th, 2007 at 12:39 pm
These editors have been the least funny so far . . . maybe they are just getting unlucky with really boring stories, but the past two weeks with these guys have been so blahhh.
August 9th, 2007 at 1:29 pm
yup, i’m definitley one of those 10,000. love it.
August 10th, 2007 at 10:16 am
Things like this happen all the time, but the data security folks at the Ivies somehow think that they are immune to stupid mistakes.
In most cases, they have no reason at all to hold your SSN on file after you graduate. I actually tried to get my SSN redacted from Penn’s computer systems and replaced with my student ID #. They adamantly refused, telling me that Penn student ID numbers (which were essentially created to substitute SSNs) are one digit too short.
Why they couldn’t just add a meaningless zero to the ID number in the system is beyond me. People should be concerned about this stuff.
Sorry for the self-plugging:
http://media.www.dailypennsylvanian.com/media/storage/paper882/news/2006/12/12/Opinion/Eric-Obenzinger.Protecting.Our.Identities-2532222.shtml?norewrite200612120837&sourcedomain=www.dailypennsylvanian.com
Yeah, I get riled by this issue.