Lost Data Tape Results In Data Breach for Harvard Law School

Over 20,000 people were sent a letter from Harvard Law School alerting them that their personal information had been lost and to encourage them to watch their credit reports closely.
A data tape was lost by a technician on a subway trip to the law school in Cambridge during the month of September. He had six tapes in his backpack for the trip, and one came up missing. On this tape was personal information of about 21,000 people, over a ten year span, who had sought legal services through the school in Jamaica Plain.

The risk of identity theft is fairly low, since the tape had password protection and requires special equipment to read. Even so, Harvard Law School is willing to pay for all those affected to obtain a credit monitoring service for up to one year, as well as reimbursing those who pay to freeze their credit reports.

Harvard Law School is taking extra precautions to make sure that an occurrence like this does not happen in the future. They have purchased a new tape library with a bar-code reader, encrypted the information to protect it beyond the password, and has hired a courier service to be responsible for the transportation of tapes containing such information.

Anyone affected in this beach who does not want to freeze their credit but still wants extra protection beyond credit monitoring should consider purchasing an identity theft protection service.

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