A laptop containing the personal information of 328,000 current and former employees of Boeing was stolen in Chicago, according to the company.
The laptop theft was the third to befall Boeing in the past twelve months.
Boeing spokesman Tim Neale reassured the aerospace giant's clients and customers that there was no proprietary customer or supplier data on the missing laptop.
Boeing's employees and retirees were not so lucky, as the laptop data contained names, addresses, Social Security numbers, credit card numbers, and salary information.
An employee had left the laptop unattended and turned off, and came back to find it missing, Neale said. It was apparently not encrypted, but was password protected.
Neale did not reveal where the laptop was taken from, why the unidentified employee had it, or why the data was stored on it.
"The laptop was turned off," Neale said, obviously reassuring anyone who's never heard of such things as a replacement battery or power cord.
The laptop's lack of protection was allegedly a violation of company policy, but no indication was given if the employee would be disciplined.
Boeing is contacting the affected employees by mail and has promised to set up free credit monitoring for them through the Experian credit bureau.
Critics and consumers have noted that typical credit monitoring services are extremely limited, only covering fraud that results from usage of the credit card number. Stolen Social Security numbers can be reused to create new identities and open new accounts, which are not detected by fraud alerts.
In fact, credit agencies will simply open a new sub-file for the new account, and not inform the original number owner. Victims of SSN-based identity theft often do not find out unless a debt charged by the new accountholder comes to them.
The Latest Laptop Losses
In November 2005, Boeing misplaced another laptop with information belonging to 160,000 former and current employees. Then in April 2006, another laptop containing data on 3,500 workers disappeared. Neither laptop has been recovered, and Boeing has claimed that there has been no evidence that the information has been misused, without citing its reasons for clinging to that belief..
Boeing is far from the only entity to be hit with data breaches and equipment thefts of late.
In the past month, there has been a dramatic upsurge of incidents involving data breaches of all kinds. UCLA recently reported that it had detected an ongoing hack into its private databases, putting 800,000 students, employees, and faculty at risk.
The Kaiser Permanente health conglomerate reported the latest in its own series of laptop thefts, with the disappearance of a computer containing information on 38,000 Colorado patients from an employee's car in Oakland, California.
And the Pennsylvania Department of Transportation reported its own data breach when thieves broke into a Wilkes-Barre drivers' license center and made off with laptops containing data on 11,000 drivers.
