NYU students' information on Web for months

DURHAM -- Duke University's Fuqua School of Business is notifying 273 former New York University students that some of their personal information was inadvertently accessible by targeted Internet searches between July 2007 and April 2008.

The NYU students were part of a 1997 class taught by a professor who now teaches at the Duke business school, according to a Duke press release. The professor is not identified in the release, and a Duke spokesman declined to identify the professor.

The personal data included names and Social Security numbers and was contained in the faculty member's research records.

There has been no indication of any unauthorized access or use of the personal information, Duke officials said.

The information could have been accessed only if searched by specific student names, along with a search code for Social Security numbers.

The personal information was removed from Fuqua's public drives within 30 minutes of the school becoming aware of the problem on April 30. Within hours, all major search engines had cleared their caches and indexes of the student information, the press release states.

Fuqua began notifying the former NYU students immediately after receiving addresses from NYU. The release does not say whether all students whose personal data was compromised could be reached.