Thursday, June 08, 2006

Incident: IRS employee loses laptop with personal info on 291 employees and job applicants

From the Washington Post:

IRS Laptop Lost With Data on 291 People:

The IRS's Terry L. Lemons said the employee checked the laptop as luggage aboard a commercial flight while traveling to a job fair and never saw it again. The computer contained unencrypted names, birth dates, Social Security numbers and fingerprints of the employees and applicants, Lemons said. Slightly more than 100 of the people affected were IRS employees, he said. No tax return information was in the laptop, he said.

'The data was not encrypted, but it was protected by a double-password system,' Lemons said. 'To get in to this personal data on there, you would have to have two separate passwords.'...

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