Another stolen laptop incident that carried hundreds of thousands of records. Boeing has not mentioned whether or not the laptop was encrypted, which suggests that it probably was not.
"In the first week of December, a laptop was stolen from an employee's car," Boeing spokeswoman Kelly Danaghy said. "That laptop had files that contained Social Security numbers for about 382,000 past and present employees, and in most cases it also included a home address, phone number and date of birth."What is worse is that this is not the first such incident at Boeing.
In April, the personal information of about 3,600 employees was compromised when a laptop was taken from a Boeing human resources employee at an airport. In November 2005, a similar theft put the personal data of about 161,000 employees in jeopardy.Uh huh, don't worry about implementing corporate IT standards and tell those employees to encrypt their data. Now how does one do that again? How does someone ditch unused files since they never really go away? Interesting IT strategy at Boeing.
Last month, a Boeing online memo warned that another computer with "old, unencrypted salary planning files containing personally identifiable information on 762 individuals" had been taken from an employee's home. "This incident underscores the importance for all Boeing employees to either use encryption or rid their computers of old, unused files, particularly those containing personally identifiable information," Boeing said in the memo.
