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Monday, August 14, 2006

'Juicy' Florida Laptop Stolen

A US Department of Transport Official's lap top was stolen from his car the other day, while the owner was having a meal in a restaurant.

The laptop held details of of over 133,000 Florida residents and included names; addresses; birthdates and Social Security numbers of the individuals concerned.
Official information from the OIGwebsite includes the statement from investigators "OIG does not have reason to believe that the perpetrator or perpetrators targeted the laptop because of any knowledge of the data contents,".

With identity theft and the subsequent white collar fraud being the fastest growth area of criminal activity on both side of the Atlantic, it may be true that the thief originally may have stolen it for its 're-sale' value but would soon have realised the value of the data would far outweigh that of the hardware.
According to the same report the OIG official stated the laptop was password protected. We assume that means either the BIOS password or the Windows login passwords were set. It does not say the device was encrypted which it should have been.

The DOT have taken a variety of actions as a result of the loss including "Individual notification letters are being sent to at-risk Floridians" , asssuming each letter was a minimum of £10 the bill for the personal notifications alone will be close to £1.5 Million; and we're sure that the legal bills will at least double that!

Related Links
Red face for Florida official as laptop stolen : By Todd R Weiss, Computerworld (US online)
US Department of Transport
DOT Office of Inspector General
OIG Data Security Portal laptop theft
Safeguard Easy Hard Disk Encryption for Laptops