43,000 Yale students and staff members become potential identity theft victims

NBC Connecticut revealed that approximately 43,000 Yale University students and staff members were vulnerable to identity theft after their names and Social Security numbers were disclosed to the public for 10 months until the institution realized, GlobeNewswire announced. Due to this accidental exposure of records, Connecticut tallied more than 1.8 million records breached in the past two years, ranking 8th in the country over that time period, according to the Privacy Rights Clearinghouse. Mike Prusinski, senior vice president of corporate communications at a leading identity theft protection agency, said in a statement that universities have been exposed to an unacceptable amount of identity breaches over the past six years and haven't done enough to prevent further instances. "There are clearly companies that report data breaches who are not first time offenders. Yale has appeared on the data breach list three times since 2007, and at what point do we say enough already?" asked LifeLock Senior Vice President of Corporate Communications Mike Prusinski. Unfortunately, there's no way of knowing when the personal information became public, who stole it or where it is now, Prusinski added.