E-mail
PrintBy Thursday, 100 students had responded to Tuesday’s e-mail warning them that their Social Security numbers might have been visible in the envelope window when their 1098-T Forms were mailed the previous week.
The e-mail, from Nikki Krawitz, UM vice president for finance and administration, recommended that affected students monitor their credit.
In 2007, an unknown person accessed a database containing the names and Social Security numbers of 22,396 current and former UM System employees. No identity theft cases were reported following the incident, but it was recommended that the victims should monitor their credit for the next few years.
Penn State University had a computer security breach in late December that may have jeopardized personal information of individuals at the university. The university contacted 30,000 individuals to alert them that their Social Security numbers may have been exposed when computers were infected with Malware, a malicious software. Following the incident, officials with the university said that they were working on safeguarding information on university computers.
Despite these breaches being the fault of the university, MU is unwilling to pay for fraud protection for its students and faculty.
With two breaches of personal information within the last few years, what should MU do to protect the Social Security numbers of its students and faculty? Should the university provide fraud protection to those whose personal information has been compromised?
Show Me the Errors 
Comments
Two comments:
Where will any necessary funding come from? Oh, we can do what we always do: increase tuition and/or fees to cover costs. Students and their families won't mind, will they? For faculty and staff we can take deductions from pay checks. Or the legislature can be asked to make special appropriations (lots of luck with that).
Here we have another instance of something which, if enacted, should be a system policy and not the policy of some campus within that system.
As someone who has been affected by the most recent security breach I believe the University should reimburse me for the cost of monitoring my credit. I do not necessarily believe that the University needs to offer fraud protection for students and faculty. They do, however, need to reexamine the way they handle sensitive information.