More than 760,000 current and former Ohio State University students, faculty and staff this week are being notified that their personal information was repeatedly compromised earlier this year by hackers who managed to access an unsecured university server.

In an advisory posted on the university's website, school officials said they began sending out notification letters this week to all affected individuals.

The breach, which was first discovered during a routine IT security review in late October, allowed the hackers to access student and staff files containing names, social security numbers, birth dates and addresses.

Once the breach was discovered, university officials immediately "isolated" the server and "launched a thorough investigation including use of some of the nation’s best cyber forensic consultants."

Investigators later determined that the unauthorized access was used to launch cyber attacks on other online businesses, though officials did not identify the other businesses affected.

"Although we firmly believe that this incident has not and will not result in identity theft, we are exercising an abundance of caution and will notify affected individuals," university officials said in the advisory.

Ohio State became the second Big Ten Conference school to recently acknowledge a major security breach. The University of Wisconsin for the past month has been warning students and faculty of a database breach that exposed more than 60,000 individuals' social security numbers and other sensitive information.

Officials at both schools said they're in the process of reviewing all security procedures and policies to prevent future intentional or accidental security gaffes.

State schools and universities are among the most likely government agencies to suffer data breaches. According to security software vendor Application Security, more than 2.3 million files have been breached at U.S. colleges since 2008.

Ohio State officials said the school will provide one year of free credit monitoring services for all affected students, former students and staff.

Larry Barrett is a senior editor at InternetNews.com, the news service of Internet.com, the network for technology professionals.

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