Cyber attacks against a university that leads to ID theft are hard to prevent, but try telling your students that. There are some preventative measures colleges can take,including the obvious, such as limiting or eliminating use of Social Security numbers as identifiers. This article, originally published by the University Risk Management and Insurance Association last year, takes an in-depth look at ID thefts on college campuses and what universities are doing to prevent it.

Colleges and universities keep hundreds of thousands of constituent records in computerized systems and for them, the threat of this information becoming compromised is very real. Hackers are the most obvious causes of student ID thefts. But there are other methods: stolen or lost laptops, for example. There’s also the case of a simple thumb drive containing student rosters that was stolen from a professor at a southern university.

“Protecting against identity theft and data loss is ultimately not unlike other risk mitigation on campus: identify the bad guys, identify what they are doing and how, and then take proactive steps to ward them off,” say this article’s authors. The article can be accessed here after you go through a brief, and free, registration process.