Harvard University is providing a year of free identity theft credit monitoring to thousands of applicants after its electronic application records were hacked; the records contain Social Security Numbers, ages, home addresses and other building blocks of identity theft. It's serious, as one applicant informed me he'd received his warning by overnight FedEx. The Chronicle of Higher Education reports.

Meanwhile, the New England-based Hannaford grocery chain reports that at least 4.2 million credit card and debit cards may have been compromised in the latest merchant breach. The Patriot-Ledger (MA); the Washington Post.

If you are offered free credit monitoring after a breach, be suspicious if they claim to need your credit card or checking account number to set it up; you need to be sure that the product is not set up to automatically convert to a fee-based system with automatic billing at the end of that free year, unless you remember to cancel.