An electronic security breach last month exposed the Social Security numbers of more than 1,000 Office of Physical Plant (OPP) employees from 2000, an OPP spokesman said Tuesday.

Paul Ruskin, OPP communications coordinator, said a virus was downloaded to an OPP administrative computer on Feb. 20, and Information Technology Services' Security Operations and Services notified OPP of the security concern on March 2.

The employees whose names and Social Security numbers were on the list were notified by e-mails and paper letters, Ruskin said.

However, Ruskin repeatedly said there is no indication as of now that the crucial identity information was accessed by the virus, and none of the employees whose names were in the file have contacted OPP about potential identity theft.

The university made a decision in 2003 to no longer refer to students and employees by Social Security numbers in all computer files for electronic security reasons, Ruskin said.

"The computer was in routine use," he said.

"It's possible that an e-mail came through and had an infected attachment. We don't really know; we can always speculate," he said.

Ruskin added the computer that was infected was removed from the office and had been in routine use at the time of the breach. Also, OPP is currently going through all of its computers to ensure that there are no other files with Social Security numbers still in existence.

Ruskin said OPP is concerned about protecting its employees, so the decision was made to notify those employees whose names were in the file.

"Even though it's fairly unlikely that there would be a problem, we wanted to alert people to the possibility of it," he said.