Symanetc & HP Warn Employees After Laptop Thefts

Just to show that nobody is immune to laptop theft, Symantec the security company who even touts their own anti-theft solutions to help with laptop theft…have had laptops stolen with employee data on them. The Symantec breach occurred on Oct. 18 and affected fewer than 100 employees who were being laid off as part of a restructuring of the company’s IT operations. “Somebody who was working on the project took their computer home with them,” said Cris Paden, a Symantec spokesman. “Burglars came in and stole a bunch of items in the house.” Not only do these employees get to lose their jobs, now they can lose their identies as well, just in time for Christmas. What is interesting is that it is mentioned that “Symantec has nearly completed the process of encrypting all corporate laptops”. Hmm I wonder what took them so long, I am guessing they don’t have to buy their own software, so even if it is free it still takes this long for them to deploy? Ugh.

Thursday HP also announced HP at least several thousand employee records were contained on a laptop that was stolen several months ago from an HP employee based in the Houston area. At first HP thought that there was no sensitive information on the laptop, but after looking into back-up files, the company realized that it contained names and Social Security numbers of current and former employees. This is offensive on many levels, the fact that the company does not even know what is on an employees laptop makes you wonder how many other important details are on their other employee laptops. I am not sure which is worse, having the data unencrypted on a stolen laptop, or HP not knowing what data is on their employees computers, I wonder what IT policies are in place to deal with management of sensitive information, from the looks of it, there isn’t any.