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Huge Data Theft at U-Miami


April 17, 2008

The University of Miami has announced that a case of six computer back-up tapes containing data on 2.1 million patients was stolen from a vehicle on March 17. Anyone who has been a patient at the university since Jan. 1, 1999, is likely included on the tapes.

Misuse of the information on the tapes is highly unlikely, the university stated. It engaged the computer security firm Terremark Worldwide to determine the feasibility of accessing and extracting data from a similar set of backup tapes. “Because of the highly proprietary compression and encoding used in writing the tapes, we were unable to extract any usable data,” says Christopher Day, senior vice president at Terremark Worldwide. An independent consulting firm observed the work.

Data about most patients on the tapes included names, addresses, Social Security numbers or health information. But the university will notify by mail approximately 47,000 patients whose data may have included credit card or other financial information.

The university is not offering free credit monitoring services to any affected patients. “All the experts told us this information can’t be breached,” says a university spokesperson. The university has launched a Web site that explains what happened, the attempts to retrieve data from similar tapes, and how to obtain and monitor credit reports. The Web site is at dataincident.miami.edu.

The tapes were stolen from a vehicle used by an off-site storage company contracted by the university. The theft was one of a series of petty thefts in downtown Coral Gables on March 17, law enforcement authorities told the university.

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