Yikes! These are not the kinds of people who need to have their information disclosed. Students are just building their credit. For them to go through someone trashing them so early could be really detrimental. 🙁

Federal student loan program exposes data on 21,000 users:

The U.S. Department of Education has disabled its Direct Loan Servicing System, the online payment feature of its Federal Student Aid site, because of a software glitch that exposed the personal data of 21,000 students who borrowed money from the department, said Education Department spokeswoman Jane Glickman in an e-mail to Computerworld.

When a borrower was online late last Sunday or early on Monday, his personal information — including name, Social Security number, birth date and address — could have been exposed to another user who was also signed on at the same time and doing the exact same step, Glickman said.