BACKING UP important data on an external hard drive—and then locking that hard drive up in a safe—might sound like a good safety precaution. But it turns out it wasn’t enough to keep out thieves at Washington State University, where an 85-pound locked safe containing a backup of personal data was stolen last week. The robbery spurred an email blast to nearly 1 million people, including students, graduates and other research subjects, who could be affected by the breach.
Some of the information on the device included social security numbers, the Seattle Times reported, and other data stored by the college’s Social & Economic Sciences Research Center. According to the article, some of the data was encrypted and password protected; however, a team of computer forensic scientists have still been called to find out what data could be vulnerable on the flash drive.
