Boeing Grappling With Data Theft

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Some 382,000 Boeing (Quote) employees are receiving free credit
monitoring after the company confirmed yet another laptop containing personal data was
recently stolen. This time from an employee’s car.

The Social Security numbers, names, birth dates, home addresses
and phone numbers, as well as salaries of both current and retired employees,
were available in two unencrypted computer files on the password-protected laptop.

Tim Neale, Boeing’s media director, refused to say where the theft took
place or why the employee had unencrypted employee data on his or her
computer.

Boeing said the most recent identity theft resulted from an employee
violating a requirement to remove all personally identifiable data from
company computers, a step taken in response to previous laptop thefts.

The aerospace company also began requiring the automatic encryption of all
data stored on computers.

In a statement, Boeing said it was “committed to both helping every affected
individual protect their identity and to ensuring that future incidents of
this nature do not occur.”

Neale said Boeing is providing employees affected by the recent laptop theft
with free three-year credit monitoring, and would extend for another year the
credit and ID theft services it already provides victims of the previous laptop
thefts.

But former FBI ID theft specialist R.M. Tracy and founder of the Privacy Trust
Group, said a few years of free credit checks doesn’t go far enough.

Thieves will own that personal information forever, she said. Although
laptops are frequently cited as a source of identification breaches,
sensitive data can also be found on BlackBerry e-mail devices.

This incident marks the third theft of
personal data stored on Boeing laptops within the past 13 months.

A Boeing laptop containing personal information
on 160,000 employees was stolen in November 2005, and in April a laptop with
the names of 3,600 Boeing employees was taken.

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