Campus police at the University of California, Berkeley have recovered a stolen laptop that contained information of more than 98,000 of the school’s graduate students.
The laptop’s hard drive had been wiped clean of information and then sold on an Internet auction site, making it impossible to determine whether the sensitive information it had contained was accessed, the University said in a statement.
The laptop was stolen March 11 after it was left unattended in the school’s Graduate Division, prompting U.C. Berkeley to begin sending letters and e-mails to the 98,369 graduate students and applicants whose names and personal information had been stored on the computer.
Many of the laptop’s files contained sensitive information, including birth dates, addresses, Social Security numbers and names. California law requires that efforts be made to contact those affected in data theft cases.
About a month after the theft, an unidentified woman sold the laptop to a San Francisco man, who then sold it on eBay to an unsuspecting South Carolina resident, says Janet Gilmore, spokeswoman for U.C. Berkeley.
That San Francisco man, Shuki Alburati, was arrested June 8 and charged with possession of stolen property, Gilmore says. That case is pending, she says.
By the time it was recovered, the computer’s hard drive had been wiped clean and outfitted with a new operating system, making it virtually impossible to determine whether the sensitive information had been accessed, Gilmore says.
Gilmore would not say how the police tracked the laptop to South Carolina.
In late April, Berkeley hired PricewaterhouseCoopers to conduct an audit of how the school handles sensitive material, and the firm is evaluating how to implement the audit’s recommendations, Gilmore says.
Before this theft, the California university system had been working to encrypt data on its laptops and portable devices, a policy spurred by similar data thefts. Last September, one of the state universities lost a laptop hard drive containing sensitive information on 23,000 students and employees.
