The personal information of almost 80,000 students on eight California State University System campuses have been exposed, Inside Higher Ed reported.

The victims of this breach were enrolled in a required online course on sexual violence, which was provided by an outside vendor, We End Violence. The students' email addresses, gender, race, relationship statuses and sexual identities were exposed. Information such as social security and credit card numbers were not compromised.

"Protecting student data and personal information is a top priority of the California State University (CSU)," read a statement issued by the chancellor's office. "As soon as it was learned that student information was exposed by a third-party vendor (hired to provide Web-based sexual assault and prevention training), immediate action was taken at the eight impacted campuses to further safeguard student information."

Cal State spokeswoman Toni Molle told The Los Angeles Times two other vendors were also providing sexual prevention courses to students at California State University, but the data of students who took training with those companies were not hacked.

Carol Mosely, director of We End Violence, told The Los Angeles Times that the company was first alerted about "possible breach" on Ag. 24. Two days later the website was shut down. Students were not informed about the breach until a week later.

"We were working as quickly as we could and had to be sure we had the correct student list and that the CSU system was aware of what was going on ... so they could provide their own responses," Mosely said. "We believe in shutting down the website on the 26th we were protecting students at that point."

Affected students were advised to change their passwords and beware of phishing emails.

California State system has hired a forensics team to investigate the data breach.