A laptop computer containing the names and Social Security numbers of 93,000 people who attended Metropolitan State College was stolen from an employee’s home, leaving students vulnerable to identity theft.
Students who attended the college from the 1996 fall semester through the 2005 summer semester could be at risk, campus officials said.
The laptop was stolen from the home of an admissions office employee on Saturday. He was authorized to have the data for a Title III grant he was working on for the school.
The employee is also a graduate student in the department of public affairs at the University of Colorado at Denver, and was using the data to complete his master’s thesis.
Campus officials are investigating whether the employee should have been allowed to use the data for his thesis and if disciplinary action should be taken. They are also investigating procedures to determine if the data should have been authorized for release in the first place.
“We are trying to determine whether he was implicitly or explicitly authorized to use this information for his master’s thesis,” said college president Stephen Jordan. “We are putting a plan in place to prevent this in the future and make sure it does not happen again.”
None of the information that was on the laptop appears to have been used for the purpose of identity theft, so far. Campus officials don’t think the person who stole the computer knew it contained the information.
Students whose personal information has been lost are advised to put a fraud alert on their credit reports.
The college has launched a website with more information for those affected.
It contains phone numbers, links to credit agencies and steps to prevent identity theft.
