The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill on Friday began notifying about 163,000 women about the potential compromise of their Social Security numbers and other personal information after a hacker breached a system containing the data.
The breached server belonged to the UNC School of Medicine and contained information that was collected as part of a federally funded mammography research project.
Matt Mauro, chairman of the university's Department of Radiology said the breach was first discovered in July when a researcher reported problems accessing the system.
The sites that were sending the information to UNC have stopped doing so for the moment, while stronger precautions are implemented to prevent a similar breach in future, he said.
The reason that notifications have only just started going out is because UNC technology officials and an external forensic team have required time to piece together the extent of the compromise and to figure out exactly who may have been affected by it, Mauro said.
Automated summary from: Computer World
