The Texas Guaranteed Student Loan Company has lost the private information of some 1.3 million students stored in its database, including Social Security numbers. The loss puts all students involved at risk of indetity theft:
The equipment, which was not identified, contains the names and Social Security numbers of the borrowers, the Texas Guaranteed Student Loan company said in a statement Tuesday. The hardware was lost by an employee of Hummingbird, a enterprise software company hired to prepare a document management system, it said.
The information was prepared by the loan company in January for use by Hummingbird. The data was encrypted and password-protected, but subsequently decrypted and stored on the now-lost hardware by the Hummingbird employee, Texas Guaranteed Student Loan said. However, the lost hardware does require a password for access.
"The data was protected through security measures, and given the technology that would be required to retrieve the data, Hummingbird believes that any misuse of the data is extremely unlikely," Toronto-based Hummingbird said in a statement Wednesday.
The equipment was lost on May 24, and Texas Guaranteed Student Loan was notified by Hummingbird two days later, according to the financial institution's statement
