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Tufts warns 106,000 alumni, donors of security breach
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April 13, 2005 (IDG News Service) --
Alumni of Tufts University in Boston have been notified that personal information stored on a server used by the university for fund raising could have been exposed to intruders.
The university detected a possible security breach in an alumni and donor database after noticing abnormal activity on the server in October and December. The server was managed by a third-party vendor, according to a statement on Tufts' Web site. The incident is almost identical to a breach in March on a fund-raising system used by Boston College and follows reports of other information theft incidents in recent months at California State University, Chico, and the University of California, Berkeley.
As a precaution, Tufts sent a letter on April 7 to 106,000 alumni and donors who could be affected by the breach. Tufts said it didn't have any evidence that the information stored in the database was retrieved or misused, said Betsey Jay, director of advancement, communications and donor relations at Tufts.
The system in question belongs to the university but was running software from and being managed by RuffaloCODY, a software company in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, that assists nonprofit organizations with fund raising, membership and enrollment. The server was being used to support the university's Advancement telefund operation, in which students are paid to call alumni and other donors to solicit gifts for the university, Jay said.
Tufts detected a high volume of unusual behavior on the system that indicated it might have been used as a distribution point in a file-sharing network. However, university IT staff were not able to confirm that any sensitive files were copied or that there was misuse of information on the system, Jay said.
Tufts didn't initially disclose the security breach but was prompted to do so after coverage of other recent security breaches, Jay said. "We started to realize that what we had seen wasn't confirmation of misuse but that we should give donors and alums the information [about the breach] as a precaution," she said.
In its letter, Tufts recommended that recipients of the letter notify their bank and ask credit bureaus to issue fraud alerts and check for any unusual activity in their name. The university also set up a toll-free support line to assist individuals whose information may have been compromised.
In March, Boston College notified 120,000 alumni that their Social Security numbers and other personal information might have been compromised. As with the incident at Tufts, that notice followed the discovery of a security breach on a third-party server that the university was using for fundraising.
BC is also a RuffaloCODY customer, according to information on RuffaloCODY's Web site.
Reprinted with permission from
IDG.netStory copyright 2008 International Data Group. All rights reserved.
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