Personal details about students were posted online by Greenwich University. Read on to find out more.

It has been reported today by the BBC that student’s personal details and notes about medical issues were posted to the University’s website, which were accesible by a Google search.

The data breach was brought to the BBC’s attention after a student found the information about Postgraduate students could be searched for using a search engine.

Greenwich University

The UK’s Data Watchdog was notified, and The Information Comissioner’s Office have confirmed an investigation is currently being undertaken.

Greenwich University have not commented on whether they knew of the data breach before the BBC investigated.

The university believes all the documents are now offline and has contacted Google to try to ensure cached copies of the documents cannot be retrieved from its search engine.

From the BBC article:

“I am very sorry that personal information about a number of postgraduate research students has been accessible on the university website,” said Louise Nadal, the university’s secretary.

“This was a serious error, in breach of our own policies and procedures. The material has now been removed. This was an unprecedented data breach for the university and we took action as quickly as possible, once the issue came to light.

“We are now acting urgently to identify those affected. I will be contacting each person individually to apologise and to offer the support of the university.

“At the same time, I am also conducting an investigation into what went wrong. This will form part of a robust review, to make sure that this cannot happen again. The findings and recommendations of the review will be published.

“We are co-operating fully with the Information Commissioner and we will take all steps necessary to ensure that we have the best systems in place for the future.”

Each student affected will be contacted individually by the University to apologise for the incident.