The problems of protecting private data are felt even by those companies which specialise in the field. Despite McAfee's area of work, the company recently lost sensitive data of 10,000 current and former workers with a little help from a Deloitte & Touche employee who left a data disk in an aeroplane.
The U.S. developer of anti-virus solutions, McAfee, recently announced the loss of private data belonging to 10,000 current and former employees.
The leak was the result of the actions of an employee at the auditing firm Deloitte & Touche USA LLP who left a compact disk with the data on an aeroplane on Dec. 15, 2005. McAfee was only informed of the incident on Jan. 11, 2006 and by Jan. 30 the company had managed to ascertain exactly which data had been lost.
The ill-fated disk contained details of current McAfee employees in the U.S. and Canada who were hired before April 2005, as well as around 6,000 former North American workers of the company. McAfee reportedly employs 3,290 people today, making the total amount of personal records leaked in the region of 10,000.
It was also announced that the lost information included names, Social Security numbers and details on stock holdings in McAfee, all of which were unencrypted. The company only started informing those affected recently. There have not yet been any signs of financial fraud or identity theft, though the company has provided credit-monitoring services.
The auditing firm Deloitte & Touche said one of their employees left an unlabelled McAfee backup CD in an airline seat pocket. Over two months have passed since the incident took place and the auditor stresses that in that time there have been no reports of the data on the disk being used in any way.
“That, of course, is no excuse. Many criminals know about the complimentary financial monitoring schemes provided in such cases and wait for about 18 months before making their move. It may well be the case that at this very moment criminals all over the world are discussing on the Internet how to withdraw the McAfee employees' money from a Chinese bank machine. Therefore, I wouldn't say that the effects of the incident will go away that quickly," says Denis Zenkin, marketing director at InfoWatch.
Source: SearchSecurity.com
