Connecticut College announced on February 7th that it had suffered a significant data breach going back to March of 2023.  While the college, in its announcement indicated that it had “promptly contained the incident, took steps to remediate the issue, notified law enforcement and commenced a forensic investigation to identify what personal information was involved” it notably did not notify members of the Connecticut College community who were affected by the data breach until last week.  The school is now offering credit monitoring to those people whose Social Security numbers were compromised in the data breach,

Data breaches at colleges and universities are common. The reason for targeting universities and colleges is simple.  Generally they maintain tremendous amounts of personal information and many schools have not done a good job of securing the sensitive information they hold.    Colleges and universities have much personal information that is often easily accessible within the school’s computer systems.  Too often schools have permitted the information to be on unencrypted laptops and flash drives.   In addition many schools do not have sufficient security programs in place to limit access to personal information, which the universities keep in their computers long after it is necessary to be kept, such as Social Security numbers for students who have long since graduated.

TIPS

Colleges and universities must make a greater commitment to data security. Data breach prevention systems should be implemented that include, but not be limited to updated firewalls, limited access to personal information, purging of unnecessary information  and encryption.  Personal information should not be as open and available as they presently are at this time at many universities.  if you are someone who is a victim of the Connecticut College data breach, you should contact the college and accept its offer of  free credit monitoring although now free weekly credit reports are available to everyone.  https://www.annualcreditreport.com/index.action

You also should put a credit freeze on your credit report because credit monitoring only tells you that you have become a victim of identity theft after the fact.  A credit freeze can protect you from becoming a victim in many instances.