On Nov. 9, thousands of Fordham emails were affected by a data breach, resulting in email passwords, names, phone numbers and gender identities of current and past students and faculty to be compromised.
The IT Office of Information Security and Assurance stated that the Office of Information Technology “discovered that a vendor-hosted and -managed application used by the University was compromised” and “a total of 4,800 accounts were exposed.”
Fordham IT immediately logged out all vulnerable users from their active sessions to protect their data and information.
Those affected were contacted by SMS or email and instructed to reset their passwords.
As a result of the data breach, the university has “terminated ties with the vendor,” citing outdated security practices which lead to this issue.
“The Office of Information Technology takes data security concerns seriously, and it is crucial that vendors used by the University also conform to stringent IT and data security standards,” said IT. “In the past five years, we have implemented rigorous security requirements for vendors hosting our applications and data.”
Allison Schneider, FCRH ‘26, was one of the students affected by the breach.
“When I got the text from the Emergency Notification System, I originally thought it was one of those scam texts and ignored it,” she said.
“Eventually, I did reset it and had to log back in on every platform that uses my school login.”
The SMS message to affected students read “Your Fordham password is compromised. Reset it now: Go to fordham.edu, click Log In, Forgot Password, Enter a new one. Reply with YES to confirm receipt.”
Nicole Braun, FCRH ‘24, was also affected and said that the IT portal was incongruent with resetting her password. The process took several tries, at which point Braun was in the middle of midterms.
“It actually took a few days for me to receive school emails like normal again, which was inconvenient,” said Braun.
The office is looking to replace the now-deactivated application in the near future to better aid the university community and prevent this from happening in the future.
Students will questions or concerns can reach out to IT. Students should be changing their passwords intermittedly and practicing internet safety.
