A UF College of Dentistry computer server containing personal information of about 344,000 patients was breached by an unauthorized intruder, UF officials announced Wednesday.
The infiltrated database included patients' names, addresses, birth dates, Social Security numbers and some protected health information that could have been accessed by the intruder.
The breach was found Oct. 3 during a routine server upgrade, said Dr. Teresa Dolan, dean of the dental college. The server was taken offline and reconfigured to fix its vulnerability, she said.
Dolan said no evidence has been found that patient information has been used by the intruder.
Possible victims have been notified by mail about what happened.
"Our servers are bombarded daily, and they're constantly under attack," Dolan said. "We do our best to protect intrusion, but unfortunately in this case, they were able to access our database."
After the breach was discovered, university technology officials began scanning more than 60,000 other UF computers, according to a UF news release.
Dolan said other potential vulnerabilities had been fixed, and the discovery of such openings did not mean anyone had accessed them.
UF will not face penalties by state medical boards, Dolan said, and the college has followed the law regarding the notification of patients when information is possibly illegally accessed.
"We really managed our data in an appropriate way, and unfortunately, sometimes these IT issues are kind of like a cat-and-mouse situation," Dolan said. "There's just a lot of bad guys out there."
The college has reinforced the firewalls protecting its servers from these types of attacks.
Janine Sikes, UF spokeswoman, said Chief Information Officer Charles E. Frazier was out of the office Wednesday afternoon and was referring all inquiries to the UF Health Science Center.
The University Police Department and the FBI are investigating the incident.
Those who think their privacy may have been breached can call a hot line at 1-866-783-5883.
Dolan said a few of the people who called Wednesday were confused about whether they were even UF patients. The college runs a pathology biopsy lab, she said, and so some victims may not have had any direct contact with the school.
The intrusion of the server comes despite tightened security measures over the past few years as well as two other security breaches associated with UF that were uncovered in the past six months.
In May, an assistant professor of plastic surgery at UF's College of Medicine in Jacksonville resigned after UF officials found he gave away a computer containing confidential patient information.
In June, UF officials notified about 11,000 current and former students of the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences because some of their private information was posted online.
Dolan said despite all the safeguards, she is not surprised attacks like this happen.
"No system is 100 percent fail-safe," Dolan said.
