TREASURE ISLAND, Florida— High School senior Matthew Kuba is ready for college. But to get there he had to spend hours online filling out financial aid forms and college applications.
They’re asking for your parents’ total balance of cash, savings, and checking accounts,” said Kuba showing us his application.
College applicants like Kuba start by filling out the FAFSA, a detailed Federal Student Aid form required by most universities whether they qualify for assistance or not.
“It was just kind of like… where does this all go,” looking at the massive list of information he was required to submit for admission.
Matthew says he was unprepared for just how much information would be collected.
“Parent’s social security…along with when they were married. It’s asking for their date of birth, so pretty much anything that could be used to identify me online is just as abundant as the information they’re getting on my parents,” said Kuba.
It’s all that information–experts warn–that could be vulnerable to criminals trying to hack into college servers.
“It is happening at universities across the county [and] it is happening right now,” said Cyber Security expert Steven Casco of CardNotPresent.com.
“They not only get one bit of information, they get an entire family’s information,” said Casco. “They get the mother and the father, the social security, the amount in the bank, the son or the daughter. Not just the one who is applying to [the] school but the other dependents that those parents have. That is a treasure trove from criminals.”
Casco says over the past year and a half, more than 100 colleges have reported breaches of sensitive information. Top notch institutions like Butler University where last June, the birthdates, Social Security numbers and bank account information for nearly 163,000 students were stolen.
At Tallahassee Community College, financial aid information for 2,800 students was also compromised in 2011. The breach wasn’t discovered until students found out months later.
Two men in Miami were arrested in connection to using the information to allegedly file 3.3 million dollars in fraudulent tax returns.
“They don’t care if it’s a private institution or an Ivy league School, or a community college around the block,” said Casco. “If they can get in they’re going to want to get in, and they’re going to want to steal as much as they can.”
Worst of all, applicants have no way to know how secure the college they’re applying to really is.
“One school might be doing absolute gangbusters in locking everything down which is fantastic; [but] the other three schools you apply to may not have no controls whatsoever. And you don’t know! And that to me is a truly scary thing.”
“I got into UF though,” said Kuba with a smile!
As Matthew heads up to Gainesville he’s confident the University of Florida is taking steps to keep his information safe but still worries about his identity falling into the wrong hands.
“No matter how much security you have, it’s never enough. You can’t stop it,” worries Kuba.
So what can you do as a student applying or as a parent?
Experts suggest that you can call the universities you’re applying to and ask about their data security. If nothing else, it lets them know data security is something that’s important to you and something that they should be making a top priority.
Secondly, experts suggest parents activate credit monitoring, not just for the student applying, but for the entire family; even younger siblings. If their identity is compromised, you might not find out until years later in their teenage years and by that time their credit could take years to repair.
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