UF's Board of Trustees, the university's highest governing body, approved federally mandated identity theft prevention measures at Tuesday's meeting.
The measures require that UF create a set of guidelines to detect, prevent and mitigate identity theft, according to board documents.
The board was also informed of UF's plans to centralize its information technology operations, which will also help prevent future privacy breaches, UF officials said, though that was only one reason for the proposed changes.
The new measures follow four recent cases of identity theft, one in which a student stole a UF employee's identity and was able to get about $31,000 in loans by using the employee as a co-signer.
"The first month he got $15,300," Susan Blair, UF's chief privacy officer, told trustees at Monday's Audit and Operations Review committee meeting.
"He apparently thought that that was a good idea, so he went back another month and got $16,000," Blair said.
Two other cases involved theft of medical insurance information, and the last case involved a patient at the Orthopaedics and Sports Medicine Institute having his personal information, including his Social Security number, used by someone to apply for a credit card.
UF has also been plagued recently by other privacy breaches. The most recent breach, announced last month, involved a foreign hacker possibly accessing the personal information, including Social Security numbers, of about 97,000 current and former UF students, faculty and staff.
In November, UF's College of Dentistry announced that a server containing the personal information of 344,000 patients had been breached.
Blair, who returned Friday from a privacy conference in Washington, D.C., told Trustees that UF's recent breaches have attracted some negative attention.
"We are, as you might imagine from all the breaches, starting to have quite a reputation in the university community," she said.
She said more breaches are possible.
"I don't think its gonna go away until we have a chance to really finish all of the things that Chuck Frazier (UF's interim chief information officer) would like to do," she said.
