Bitcoin miners unearth 30,000 college student SSNs

Staff discovered a breach of five Iowa State University servers, some of which contained Social Security and university ID numbers for students who took classes in computer science, world languages and cultures, and materials science and engineering.

“The servers were hacked by an unknown person or persons seeking to generate enough computing power to create a type of digital money known as bitcoins,” the school’s website states.

Affected students enrolled between 1995 and 2012.

"We don't believe our students' personal information was a target in this incident, but it was exposed," said Senior Vice President and Provost Jonathan Wickert. "

The infiltrated servers were made by Synology, a company that has reported similar bitcoin mining intrusions, the Des Moines Register reports.

The university destroyed the compromised servers. Others of the same type have been taken offline to be updated with hacking prevention software.

ThreatWatch is a regularly updated catalog of data breaches successfully striking every sector of the globe, as reported by journalists, researchers and the victims themselves.