Sensitive laptop stolen from a Colorado school district
A laptop that contained sensitive information on past an present employees over the past 10 years was stolen from the Steamboat Springs school district office in Colorado.How many victims? 1,300.
What type of personal information? Names and Social Security numbers.
Details: Thieves stole the laptop of District Finance Director Dale Mellor. The spreadsheet was created as part of a requirement from a past district audit. The laptop was password-protected, but district officials are warning employees to be on the lookout for identity theft.
Mellor used the laptop to access the district’s financial database and direct-deposit system, which contains bank information for all employees in the district but is protected by a firewall.
What was the response? The district contacted all current employees, but about two-thirds of the individuals on the list no longer work in the district. Cunningham said the district plans to advertise and create a database to notify past employees of the breach.
Quote: “Ultimately with his computer, they could get into the network and cause havoc,” Superintendent Shalee Cunningham said. “(But) we don’t have any reason to believe they have a way to get into that.”
Source: http://www.steamboatpilot.com/, Steamboat Pilot & Today, “Stolen computer contained 1,300 Social Security numbers,” Feb. 25, 2009.
