UF dental school data breach: 330,000 more people REALLY hate going to the dentist now.
Nobody likes going to the dentist: the whine of the drill, the scraping of metal against bone, and metal against flesh—who likes that? Well, for more than 300,000 people who get their dental work done at University of Florida, there’s another reason to hate going to the dentist.
The UF College of Dentistry just went public with the news that there’s been a major data breach. Someone has hacked into one of their servers and accessed information on more than 330,000 of the college’s patients, including their names, addresses, Social Security numbers and dates of birth.
Not all of the College’s patients are affected, however. The server held information only on patients who received dental care since 1990.
College officials say they’re uncertain why anyone would want to access their patients’ information, and want to reassure their patients that just because the hackers accessed the information, there’s no evidence that the data was copied or used in any way.
Rinse and spit all you want, but it’s not going to get that nasty taste out of your mouth.
The data breach was discovered during a routine server upgrade when the college’s information technology employees found remotely-installed software.
Your personal information is recorded in places too numerous to count. Think of every doctor and dentist you’ve ever seen, every school you ever attended, every job you’ve ever held, every credit card purchase you’ve ever made, every bank account you’ve ever opened, every loan you’ve ever applied for, every government entity that knows your name; each of them represents another opportunity for a data breach.
The University of Florida College of Dentistry data breach is the 14th such data loss or exposure the university has revealed in the past couple of years. It brings the national total for exposed records to 245,674,523 for the period beginning January 2005.
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Tags: Data breach, UF College of Dentistry, University of Florida, University of Florida College of Dentistry
December 4th, 2008 at 6:01 pm
I always hated the dentist, even before they became a liability for my personal information. Still, they’re no different than anyone else that has your information. Doctors, dentists, banks, schools, and even the government have enough information to fully steal your identity. Their systems often have very lax security as well, making them perfect victims for hackers and identity thieves.
I don’t like the thought of spending any money that isn’t absolutely necessary, but lifelock may be becoming more and more of a necessity than a convenience.