An unknown risk actor has stolen the delicate private, monetary, and well being info of almost 870,000 Columbia College present and former college students and workers after breaching the college’s community in Might.
Established in 1767 as King’s Faculty, Columbia College is a non-public Ivy League analysis college with a finances of $6.6 billion in 2024, over 20,000 workers, together with 4,700 educational workers, and over 35,000 enrolled college students throughout 19 faculties and particular applications.
The breach was found and reported to legislation enforcement authorities following an outage that affected a few of its programs on June 24, following an investigation with help from exterior cybersecurity specialists.
In notification letters filed with the workplace of Maine’s Lawyer Normal on Thursday, August 7, the college mentioned that the information breach impacts 868,969 people, together with workers, candidates, present and former college students, and relations.
“Our investigation decided that, on or about Might 16, 2025, an unauthorized third-party gained entry to Columbia’s community and subsequently took sure recordsdata from our system,” Columbia College mentioned. “So far, now we have no proof that any Columbia College Irving Medical Middle affected person data have been affected.”
The college first confirmed the information theft final week in an announcement, following studies that the alleged hacker claimed to have stolen 460 gigabytes of information from the compromised programs.
On Wednesday, the college issued one other assertion, confirming that the stolen knowledge belongs to present and former college students, candidates, and a few Columbia workers.
In keeping with the letters despatched to affected people through the U.S. Postal Service, the stolen knowledge features a mixture of private, monetary, and well being info.
“The affected knowledge included your title, date of beginning, and Social Safety quantity, in addition to any private info that you just offered in connection together with your utility to Columbia, or that we collected throughout your research in case you enrolled,” the college added.
“This included your contact particulars, demographic info, educational historical past, monetary aid-related info, and any insurance-related info and well being info that you just shared with us.”
Whereas Columbia College has no proof that the information has been misused in id theft or fraud makes an attempt, it should present two years of free credit score monitoring, fraud session, and id theft restoration providers by Kroll to these impacted by this knowledge breach.
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