RANDOLPH CENTER, Vt. (AP) – Eleven hundred students at Vermont Technical College had their names, Social Security numbers and academic information mistakenly posted on the Internet for more than 18 months, college officials said.

“We have taken swift steps to secure the information and to remove the data from the Vermont Tech server and from other sources,” Vermont Technical president Allan Rodgers said in an Oct. 12 e-mail to students and alumni.

A former Vermont Tech student came across the 2003 student information last week after plugging his own name into the Google search engine, Rodgers said. He said the college’s coordinator of tutoring services made the erroneous posting in January 2004 by trying to send student information to a secure computer drive but inadvertently sending it to the college’s public Web site.

The information also included students’ addresses, ethnicity, SAT scores and academic standings.

“This is the first time we’ve been aware that this information could be accessed,” Rodgers said. He said all college employees, including the employee who made the posting error, will get more training on computer security.

“People have to have access to information in order to do their jobs, and we need to make them understand what is secure and what is an unsecured venue for information transmission,” Rodgers said.

There is no indication that the information was downloaded by identity thieves, but the possibility that that could happen is a big concern, said Gary Kessler, an associate professor at Champlain College and director of its information security program.

Colleges and universities, with their vast computer networks and wealth of sensitive data, present rich targets for hackers, he said. The University of California, San Diego, and the University of Texas at Austin are among a growing numbers of schools that have been hit by identity thieves.