UC Berkeley hack: Personal data on 1,600 people possibly compromised

The personal information of about 1,600 people – including Social Security and credit card numbers – may have been hacked from UC Berkeley servers, a university official said.

The information was stolen from servers for the university’s Real Estate Division, a department that handles maintenance and construction of campus facilities, university spokeswoman Janet Gilmore said in a statement released Monday.

Documents and databases on the servers date as far back as the early 1990s and contained about 1,300 Social Security numbers and 300 credit card numbers, most of them held by current or former university employees.

There’s no proof the stolen data was used by hackers, Gilmore said.

Officials noticed the breach in September, took the servers offline and hired an outside firm to comb through the databases and servers for personal information.

The university began informing those affected by the breach on Dec. 12.

In a statement, the university’s interim chief security officer, Paul Rivers, said those affected can use a credit monitoring service paid by the university.

“We understand that it’s disturbing to learn that your Social Security number or credit card number may have been exposed to hackers, and we truly regret that this has occurred,” Rivers said.

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