Saturday, October 13, 2007
Prof s Laptops Stolen At Carnegie Mellon
securitypronews.com: "Two laptops were removed from a locked office during the first weekend of September at Carnegie Mellon University; these laptops contained personally identifying information about students."
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6 comments:
There are so many things wrong with the reporting of this. One, why would you ever take so long to report this? Why would you leave the professor's name out? I get that they want to keep it private and that they 'supposedly' notified all the students, but what about the ones that graduated? Overseas? Ect. It's completely idiotic that they've kept this under wraps for so long. CMU... get on it.
I think the real issue here is and always has been the use of social security numbers. There have been issues with information leaks in colleges for years, in almost every industry especially banking, and even the armed forces. If we could just use randomly generated numbers or something instead of ssns for identification, all of these losses or thefts would be simply a loss equal to the monetary value of the hardware. CMU, luckily, started switching over a few years ago (after another college had a huge issue with this), but identity theft has been an issue since credit cards first became widely accepted.
I find it rather stupid that in this day and age of identity theft and digital technology the data on those stolen laptops wasn’t protected at all. Now think about the facts. They were stolen from an office in Wean. Wean houses the Computer Science department which is supposedly a very good program. A professor was a CS professor meaning he has to be very bright to teach at this top rated CS school. Now this CS wiz had sensitive data on his laptop and didn’t protect it at all. Come on people, I can protect a file and I’m a drama major. Alright stupidity happens. And this wouldn’t have been a problem except that it was social security numbers. Now why do we have student ID numbers if they still use our SSIDs? I don’t want people to have that. Your identity is one of the most valuable possessions and also one of the hardest things to protect these days it seems. Why doesn’t CMU stop, take a breath, and pull it’s head out of it’s ass and realize that this is not the type of information that should be given out, and especially not the kind that can be compromised lightly.
I didn't think there was that many thefts at carnegie mellon. I leave my lap top lying around my study floor lounge but now I'll think overwise and be careful where I put my lap top. i hope the students information is not intended for identity theft and it is bizare that there would be that kind of information on one's lap top.
I have to agree with Chapel...why is it only being reported now that these laptops were stolen? And why shouldn't the school be held accountable for helping these students keep track on their identities since they waited over a month to release this information? That's just absolutely ridiculous on all counts.
Why would you publish something like this. That's fairly ridiculous on all accounts. Now that the value of the laptops is known that can only lead to more problems. Also agreeing with Chapel, why would you wait to report this? Were they just hoping that perhaps they would turn up? Not cool. You like to think that your information is safe but you just have to have constant vigilance over your own identity.
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