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Not Again?!?

Posted on May 20, 2007 by Michelle Pastor

The newly merged Alcatel-Lucent just announced a similar mishap to IBM’s – which I recently blogged about.  Employees of Alcatel-Lucent and retirees of Lucent have been notified that an unencrypted CD has been reported missing.  The disc was prepared by Hewitt Associates, a vendor of Alcatel-Lucent’s, which included names, dates of birth, Social Security numbers and salary information.  As with the IBM incident, the disc was in the process of being transported from Hewitt to Aon (both vendors) via UPS.  It disappeared sometime between April 3 and May 5.

I don’t understand – Why don’t companies find it important to encode their employees’ sensitive data, especially in light of all the news about identity theft?   Shouldn’t that have been an important part of the contract with Hewitt?

And another thing – The data went missing sometime between Apr 3 and May 5. That’s almost a month!  It seems that someone would have been looking for the disc long before a whole month had passed.

And yet none of the companies involved will be fined for their mistake – which would really deter companies from losing their employees’ data.

Read the whole story on eweek.



Filed under: Data Breach, Identity Theft

Tags: Alcatel-Lucent, hewitt, identitytheft, idtheft, retiree

Comments

ed dickson on May 21, 2007

Gotta love official press releases on data breaches:

"No information regarding customers or their accounts was on the disc, and the disc did not contain credit card numbers, bank account numbers or password information, Alcatel-Lucent officials added."

Of course what isn't being said is that the disc has all the information needed to assume a person's identity and open up plenty of lines of credit.

Also, if they are storing all this information on an unecrpyted disc, I would be more worried about a dishonest employee making a copy.

This kind of information is worth money to criminals and can be eaily sold - even right over the Internet.

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