Harvard Says Computers Were Breached

Wade Roush3/14/08

Harvard University in Cambridge, MA, announced this week that hackers infiltrated computers containing student admissions and housing data for the university’s Graduate School of Arts and Sciences. The extent of the data loss, which was discovered in mid-February, has not been determined, but the intruders may have gained access to names, Social Security numbers, dates of birth, addresses, e-mail addresses, phone numbers, test scores, previous schools attended, and academic records for 6,600 admissions applicants and 500 housing applicants, the university said. GSAS administrative dean Margot Gil said the school has notified those affected and offered its apologies along with free ID theft recovery services from New York-based Kroll Inc.

Wade Roush is Xconomy's chief correspondent and editor of Xconomy San Francisco. You can e-mail him at wroush@xconomy.com or follow him on Twitter at twitter.com/wroush.