Yale Hit with Massive Data Breach

Yale University, one of the nation's best-known schools, recently began notifying thousands of people associated with it that their information was exposed in a data breach, and accessible online for 10 months.

More than 43,000 people, including faculty, staff and both current and former students as of 1999, had their personal information exposed by the breach, according to a report from the Yale Daily News. The data, which included names and Social Security numbers for affected consumers, was stored on an FTP server accessible through a Web search. The school learned of the breach on June 30.

"We immediately blocked that server from the Internet, removed the file and did a complete scan of the server to make sure there were no additional at-risk files," Yale information technology services director Len Peters told the newspaper.

For more information about how consumers can protect themselves after their information is exposed in a data breach, please consult the blog maintained by Identity Theft 911 chief information security officer Ondrej Krehel.