The university has been made aware that personal details of USS members may have been compromised in a data breach of Capita servers.

Scheme members may have seen an email update from the USS Trustee regarding a data breach of Capita servers, and the recommendation from Capita that the working assumption should be that certain data was accessed and/or copied by hackers in the breach.

What personal data has been compromised?

Capita have identified from their investigations that personal data was “exfiltrated” (i.e., accessed and/or copied) by the hackers. The information accessed includes your title, initial(s), and name, your date of birth, your National Insurance number, your USS member number and your retirement date.

All members have been emailed to alert them to this event, and letters are being sent to those members who have not shared their email addresses.

The university’s Pensions Team would like to confirm that you should treat this correspondence as genuine.

Capita confirm that they have taken extensive steps to recover and secure the data as well as monitoring the dark web to confirm that data compromised as a result of this incident is not circulating more widely.

What is being done to protect my personal information?

Both Capita and USS regret that this has happened but they have reiterated that the risk of identity theft is low. However, they are committed to supporting scheme members, who are being given access to identity protection service Experian, free of charge for 12 months.

For more information about the cyber incident including Q&As, please visit the USS webpages.

You can also see an update from Capita about actions they have taken to resolve the cyber incident.

For any queries or questions not covered on the website, please contact USS directly.