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Educational preparation company The Princeton Review accidentally leaked personal data including test scores of Florida students on its Web site - as long as one can call posting personal data of 34,000 students a leak.
One of the files contained the information about 34,000 Florida students, while another one consisted of names and birthdates of 74,000 students, The Princeton Review wrote in a report. The company has initiated an internal investigation to determine how the files became public, but refused to give any further details.
The Times said that it notified the Princeton Review about the mistake on Monday and the testing service remedied it quickly. However, the mistake made it possible for anyone to access the files over a period of nearly seven weeks, The New York Times reported.
Other details about the Florida students contained in the leaked files included ethnicity, learning disabilities, performance on state tests and so on. According to Superintendent Lori White of the Sarasota school district, the students affected by the breach were mostly in the second through 10th grades.
The breach occurred after the company moved its web hosting to a new provider. Numerous students from Fairfax County, Va., also had their information posted online.
“We have apologized to our customers for this situation, and assured them that access to the information has been closed, and that we are working diligently to put in place any needed remedies to make certain this problem does not recur," the Princeton Review said in a statement released by its executives.
Similar breaches are actually quite frequent. Over the past year, there have been 466 reported breaches in the United States. Dominion Enterprises, a media and information services company, said that a computer in its InterActive Financial Marketing Group was hacked last winter for a few months. Consequently, personal data of 92,000 online credit seekers of the company have been exposed.
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