Forty-five students who were enrolled in “Computer Applications in Agricultural Economics” in spring 2001 were notified that their personal information, including Social Security numbers, were available on the Internet until last month.
K-State was notified after a student who was enrolled in the class searched his name online and found the page, which had been accessible for eight years.
Allen Featherstone, professor in agricultural economics, said the pages were no longer active but had not been taken down and could still be accessed via search engines. Though Featherstone was not employed at K-State in 2001, he said a file with the students’ grades was posted so the students could access them, but it should have been another page without Social Security numbers on it that should have been posted.
“We wanted the students to be able to protect themselves,” Featherstone said. “We encouraged them to run credit checks and to put alerts on their accounts.”
No accounts of identity theft have been reported.
Aside from notifying the students, the department of agricultural economics went through its Web pages, took down all dead sites and notified search engines, including Google and Yahoo, about the sites. Some search engines retain the ability to let users gain access to the pages even after they are no longer active.
Harvard Townsend, chief information security officer at K-State, said in a recent news release that faculty and staff should take care and be more aware in terms of protecting personal student information.
When asked if an incident like this could occur in the future, Featherstone said since the information was posted pre-Sept. 11, identity theft was not as much of a concern as it is today, and security measures have greatly improved since then through applications like K-State Online.
K-State is currently in the process of eliminating the use of Social Security numbers as a form of identification through the use of the Wildcat ID number.
Some students at K-State said they are a bit unnerved about the incident but confident in the current security methods in place at K-State.
“I think if I was one of those students, I would have gone through and looked at every penny I ever spent to make sure it was actually me who spent it,” said Mallory Larsen, sophomore in pre-professional elementary education. “But at the same time, I’m not really nervous about it happening to me. Typing a password is like second nature to me now because I do it so much. I think my information is pretty secure.”
None of the affected 45 students were available for comment.
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