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UND donors’ financial info at risk

The financial information of those who donated money to the University of North Dakota may be at risk after a laptop was stolen from a third-party company that handled the information for the UND alumni association.

How many victims? 84,000.

What type of personal information? Unspecified.

What happened? The stolen laptop belonged to a South Carolina-based software company called Blackbaud, which specializes in financial software and services for nonprofit fundraising organizations. The laptop, which contained information belonging to the University of North Dakota's foundation and alumni association, was stolen from a Blackbaud employee’s car in Charleston, S.C.

Blackbaud said the employee responsible for the computer violated company policy by keeping the data too long but did not specify if the employee was reprimanded.

Details: All of the information was password-protected and encrypted. Jake Marcinko, Blackbaud’s manager of information security and monitoring told The Post and Courier that currently, no known breach of information has occurred.

Quote: "No matter how well-designed and implemented our security procedures are, including levels of password protection and data encryption, in the case of the physical theft of a computer we presume that the security of customer data has been compromised and move immediately to do everything we can to help our customers notify the people whose names and personal information are on those files," Marc Chardon, Blackbaud's president and chief executive, told The Post and Courier in a statement.

What was the response? Affected individuals were notified.

Source: www.postandcourier.com, The Post and Courier, “Stolen laptop contained donors' financial data,” June 17, 2009.

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