This is a developing story. This article will be updated as The Campus receives more information.
The third party vendor AudienceView, which Middlebury uses for event ticketing, experienced a nation-wide data breach and informed the school about it on Feb. 23, the college told the community on Sunday. Though administrators were initially told the breach had not impacted anyone affiliated with the college, they later began to receive reports from students that their credit card information appeared to have been stolen.
“...after additional investigation by Middlebury Information Technology Services (ITS) and Public Safety, including reports from students about fraudulent credit card activity, we have suspended online Box Office ticket sales at middlebury.universitytickets.com until we are confident that the vendor has appropriately secured our customer payment information,” Interim Assistant Vice President for Information Technology Services Chris Norris wrote in an email to the Middlebury community.
The data breach, which affects some people who purchased tickets via the vendor this month, includes personal information such as names, billing addresses, email addresses, phone numbers, and payment information. The breach did not impact in-person Box Office sales or other Middlebury systems, the college clarified. They encouraged students who bought tickets during the relevant timeframe to check their bank statements.
“Middlebury’s Information Technology Services (ITS) division is working with AudienceView to determine which members of our campus community may have been affected, and we will provide more information to any affected individuals once it becomes available,” Norris wrote in the all-school email.
AudienceView, formerly called University Ticket, informed users of the data breach, which has impacted many higher education institutions. This includes Worcester Polytechnic Institute, which addressed the issue on their web page. A number of students at Virginia Tech also recently reported credit card theft, and university police are investigating the matter in relation to the AudienceView breach, according to WDBJ7.
Abigail Chang ’23 (she/her) is the Editor in Chief.
She previously served as a managing editor, Senior News Editor, News Editor and co-host of The Campus' weekly news radio show.
Chang is majoring in English and minoring in linguistics. She is a member of the Media Portrayals of Minorities Project, a Middlebury lab that uses computer-assisted and human coding techniques to analyze bulk newspaper data.
Throughout last year, Chang worked on source diversity and content audits for different media properties as an intern for Impact Architects LLC. Chang spent summer 2021 in Vermont, working as a general assignment reporter for statewide digital newspaper VTDigger. Chang is also a member of the Middlebury Paradiddles, an a cappella group.
