TERRE HAUTE -- A hacker breached a computer server containing personal information of about 35,000 current and former Indiana State University students and staff, school officials said.
Officials said they did not know if the hacker downloaded any of the data, which included Social Security numbers, names, birth dates and other information.
''There is no evidence at this time to indicate that any personal information was accessed by the hackers, but we cannot rule out that possibility,'' ISU spokeswoman Teresa Exline said Tuesday.
The FBI was notified after officials at the school in western Indiana discovered last week that the server had been breached, said Exler. ISU was alerted to the problem by an organization called CERT based in Pittsburgh, a major reporting center for Internet security problems.
The server in the Office of Strategic Planning, Institutional Research and Effectiveness contained data on some 30,000 students enrolled between 1991 and 2001 and 5,000 faculty and professional staff employed between fall 1995 and fall 2002.
Officials took the server offline so it could be analyzed. The school's Office of Information Technology is investigating the breach.
ISU said it was working with the credit bureau Equifax to share fraud alerts with two other major credit bureaus.
The university plans to send letters notifying those affected by the breach by early next week. ISU delayed announcing the breach until this week because it needed time to assess the scope of the problem and to identify those affected, said Kevin Snider, an executive assistant.
The school has taken steps to avoid such security breaches, including setting up a student ID system that does not use Social Security numbers, Exline said.
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