A hacker made off with the Social Security numbers of about 22,300 current and former students of the University of Missouri at Columbia in an ambitious attack on the institution's help-desk Web site.
Apparently the hacker discovered an online form that students used to track the status of help-desk requests and flooded it with queries. In the process, he or she found a report listing the names and Social Security numbers of students who had worked on the campus, according to Computerworld.
Last year the university decided to delete employees' Social Security numbers from all of its online databases, but it seems the corrupted file was simply overlooked. –Brock Read
