By KRWG News
Las Cruces – New Mexico State University has warned some 300 people who were in a spring 2006 course that some personal information appeared on an unauthorized computer not affiliated with the school.
A company that checks for such problems notified NMSU it found the data on a computer with peer-to-peer sharing software.
NMSU chief information officer Shaun Cooper says a faculty member transferred student data to a teaching assistant's laptop in 2006.
He says the assistant left in 2007, and peer-to-peer sharing software later was installed on the laptop.
Eventually, he says, the file was accessed without the computer owner's knowledge.
Cooper says NMSU contacted the former teaching assistant, who deleted the file.
He says NMSU sent a cease-and-desist order to the owner of the non-university computer that had the file.
Copyright 2010 The Associated Press.