Duke University's Fuqua School of Business is notifying 273 former New York University students that some of their personal information was inadvertently accessible by targeted Internet searches between July 2007 and April 2008.
There has been no indication of any unauthorized access or use of the personal information.
The former NYU students were part of a class taught by a current member of Fuqua's faculty during the professor's employment at NYU in 1997. The personal data included student names and Social Security numbers, and was contained in the faculty member's NYU research records. Duke's Internet security team has ascertained that the information could have been accessed only if searched by specific student names, along with a search code for Social Security numbers.
The personal information was removed from Fuqua's public drives within 30 minutes of the school becoming aware of the problem on April 30. Within hours, all major search engines had cleared their caches and indexes of the student information.
Fuqua began notifying the former NYU students immediately after receiving addresses from NYU.
Fuqua officials have undertaken a thorough review of the school's electronic accounts to ensure no personal information is subject to unauthorized access. No former or current Fuqua students were affected.