Academia under attack.

With more than 27,000 Americans victimized each day, identity theft is a hurricane that's picking up speed — and our colleges and universities are directly in its path. Members of the academic community are at even higher risk than the average citizen, owing to factors that range from dormitory burglaries and credit card offers to promiscuous downloads and insecure grade-posting practices. The risk has been made dramatically clear in numerous recent incidents in which hackers have broken into university servers brimming with personal data — not to mention the accidental posting to the public Internet of names, addresses, and Social Security numbers for thousands of students, educators, and staff at major academic institutions.

To defend effectively against this threat requires a threefold approach:

• Members of the academic community must fully understand the dangers and how to protect against them.
• Colleges and universities must implement truly secure practices in the handling of Social Security numbers and other sensitive personal information.
• Finally, students, educators, and staff need the tools and support to defend against identity theft and to respond quickly and effectively if they are struck by this crime.

Identity Theft 911 is committed to helping academic institutions to achieve these goals. We provide the world's leading crisis resolution service for victims of identity theft. We're dedicated to ongoing consumer education — perhaps the single most important factor in helping individuals and institutions to avoid identity theft, and to respond quickly and effectively if they're hit. And we provide a comprehensive suite of defense products developed by such companies as Identity Guard, TrueLink, and TransUnion — from credit monitoring tools to fraud monitoring tools.

Identity Theft 911 can also create a customized package of notification, defense, crisis resolution, and consulting services to help your academic institution handle the threat of database compromise. We can help you structure and support your notification process, provide crisis resolution and defense to those affected, and evaluate your institution's vulnerability to workplace identity theft.

Finally, Identity Theft 911 offers Employee Assistance Program (EAP) solutions for colleges and universities — comprehensive, customized programs to help faculty and staff to deal with identity theft while containing its disruptive effect on your institution's day-to-day work and its rigorous academic calendar. Our EAP solutions include both identity theft defense and crisis resolution — services that human resources and recruiting teams can offer to current and prospective employees at a nominal cost to your institution.