College of Engineering responds to incident involving leaked student information

Edward E. Whitacre Jr. College of Engineering responds to incident involving leaked student data on Friday, March 31. 

According to the college, many undergraduate engineering students received an email at 3:06 p.m. Friday that contained other students’ FERPA-protected data.

At 3:52 p.m., the employee who sent the email containing the error sent a follow-up email explaining how the initial email was recalled and asked students to delete the message if they still had a copy.  

At 7:51 p.m., students received a different email from Stephen Bayne, the interim dean of the Edward E. Whitacre Jr. College of Engineering, that provided more information about the released data and encouraged students to change their eRaider password and monitor the account for suspicious activity.

The Daily Toreador reached out to the college for a comment about the incident and received a a comment from a university representative.

“On Friday, Mar. 31, around 3 p.m., Texas Tech University was made aware that undergraduate student data was inadvertently released by email to students in the Edward E Whitacre, Jr. College of Engineering. The data was limited to undergraduate students in the College of Engineering and did not include social security numbers or HIPAA-protected information. The email was recalled, and students were asked to delete the message. A review of this incident is underway, and we are exploring further appropriate action to remediate the impact of this disclosure.”