The Daily Californian student newspaper at UC-Berkeley reports that 493 applicants to the UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism were notified yesterday that hackers may have obtained their Social Security numbers and other private data.

The notification was sent to those who applied between September 2007 and May 2009. The security breach was discovered in the second week of July but was only made public on Tuesday.

“It just takes time to do the investigation,” said Shelton Waggener, the campus’s associate vice chancellor for information technology and chief information officer. “Once we were certain of as much info as we could be, we began the notification process and developing the notification strategy.”