About 18,700 students at the University of Virginia have been notified by a campus health official that Social Security numbers were printed along with their names and addresses on a recently mailed brochure touting a commercially offered student health insurance plan.
The brochures provided by Aetna Student Health were mailed July 3, but the university was not made aware of the problem until July 11, according to a letter to students from Dr. James Turner, executive director of student health.
“Students and parents deserve a full explanation of how this happened,” Turner wrote in the letter. “When the university provided student information to Aetna for this mailing, we inadvertently used an out-of-date computer program that automatically included Social Security numbers along with names and mailing addresses. We immediately updated the computer program used to gather the student information to prevent any recurrence. We then moved as quickly as possible to investigate what happened, identify the affected students, and notify them” by mail.
Those students will be offered one year of a credit monitoring service.
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