Man, Dear Old State has kind of been down on its luck this week in regards to financial crime, theft and embezzlement. Somebody call Rorschach.

The CDT reports today that over a 1000 Social Security numbers were stolen from an Office of Physical Plant computer – but why anybody would want to target an OPP machine with a virus without knowing specifically what was on there is beyond me.

Additionally, in the same article (which was also reposted here as a separate post for some reason), the CDT also reveals that 700 Penn State purchasing cards had to be canceled after a security breach at Heartland Payment Systems, a credit card processing company in New Jersey. This isn’t necessarily a targeted attack on the university, but more of a nationwide issue affecting banks and cardholders around the country – still, things aren’t looking good for Penn State right now.

Of course, all of this comes the same day that Penn State Live reports three Penn State employees were fired and will be facing charges for stealing funds from the University through a variety of methods. The culprits aren’t named in the article, but we can only assume one is the notorious “mobster” Tonya Sunday. It’s also strange that Penn State Live would choose to announce something so negative about the University on its own media portal – perhaps its more in the vein of assuring the public that the criminals are being dealt with.