According to the Chicago Maroon, student social security numbers (SSN) and grade reports may possibly have been compromised at the University of Chicago. The University has set up an Incident Response site where those affected by the compromise can find information about the event.
According to the Maroon article, the SSN of Alumni from 1990-2002, and the grade reports from Autumn 2003 are amongst the items believed to be compromised.
While I applaud the university for taking quick action and setting up a status website, I am hugely disappointed that they did not deem it necessary to inform affected students/alumni of what is a severe compromise of privacy and trust. I would also expect them to provide an aggregated list of compromised data, so that those affected know exactly what may have been stolen. If the Maroon is correct in its assessment of what data has been compromised, then I am among those whose data may have been stolen.
During my time at UChicago, I had the pleasure of working with some of the network administrators there, and I found them to be good people who valued the privacy of students. It is thus even more perplexing to me that I found out about this data compromise from news outlets, rather than by being informed by the university itself.
