Hundreds of thousands of people who applied for financial aid from the State of Louisiana may have had sensitive data exposed when a Boston company lost a bundle of records, The Advocate of Baton Rouge reports.
The Louisiana Office of Student Financial Assistance hired Iron Mountain Inc. to store state scholarship and student-aid files, which included bank-account data and the Social Security numbers of students and parents. But the company lost the records during a move.
The financial-aid office says it’s unlikely that any of the missing information is being misused: All the records are compressed, and it would take “sophisticated computer skills” to unlock them, according to one official. But the office has posted an online message about the data loss, and it has set up a telephone hot line for people concerned about identity theft. —Brock Read
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