The University of Maryland announced that the size of its massive February data breach isn’t as large as experts had originally feared. The school has now determined that 21,499 records contained incomplete or inaccurate data. The breached records total now 287,580.
Previously the school announced that the personal information of 309,079 faculty, staff, students and affiliated personnel from the College Park and Shady Grove campuses had been compromised.
As of Tuesday, 29,757 persons affected by the breach have registered for credit protection services, which are being offered by the school at no charge to the victims. Additionally, 78% of the records in the affected database have now been permanently purged (a total of 225,023 records). A comprehensive review of all personal information across all databases is already underway.
During the purging process, IT staff identified 56,048 records that had been pre-loaded into the database when it was created in 1998. This file included information for students who attended UMD between 1992 and 1998. These records had already been accounted for in the total count and all affected persons have either been contacted via phone or email, or will receive an official letter within the next several days.
A series of identity theft and credit protection seminars will be offered in April for the campus community.
