Yale exposes data after Google FTP switch

Names and social security numbers of 43,000 Yale University students, faculty, staff and alumni were accessible via the Google search engine for about 10 months, according to the university's newspaper.

The problem was discovered on 30 June and Yale University officials disclosed it on 12 August, offering affected individuals two years of free credit monitoring and identity theft insurance even though they said there was no indication that the information had been exploited, the Yale Daily News reported on 17 August.

The data, mostly belonging to people who worked for the university in 1999, was stored on a file transfer protocol (FTP) server that had been hidden from web search engines until September 2010, when Google's search engine started indexing FTP servers, said Len Peters, IT services director for Yale. The university's IT department was unaware of that change, he said.

For more on this ZDNet UK-selected story, see Yale oversight exposes 43,000 Social Security numbers on CNET News.