All of the victims were affiliated with Yale in 1999, and are being offered identity theft insurance and free credit monitoring services for two years, the university said in a statement last week.

The breach resulted when a File Transfer Protocol (FTP) server on which the data was stored became searchable via Google as the result of a change the search engine giant made last September, the reported

The online publication reported that Yale IT Services Director Len Peters said the FTP server holding the compromised information was used mainly for open-source materials.

In September 2010, made a change that allowed its search engine to index and find FTP servers. But university IT officials were unaware of the change, Peters told the Daily News.

When Yale discovered the breach in June, it immediately took the server offline, deleted the sensitive data and evaluated whether there were any other files containing similar data on the FTP server, Peters said.