Stanford (CA) – A stolen Stanford laptop may have contained detailed information about as many as 72000 former and current university employees.  Randy Livingston, the school’s Vice President for Business Affairs and Chief Financial Officer, says the matter has been reported to law enforcement and that the thieves will probably just erase the drive before reselling the laptop.  Of course, that assumes the thieves aren’t reading his very announcement about the theft.

The laptop contains detailed records of employees hired before September 28th 2007.  The information includes names, genders, birthdates, Social Security numbers, phone numbers, addresses, salary and a about every other record you would expect from an employee.  Thankfully though, Stanford University says no employee credit card numbers or driver’s license numbers were on the computer.

“Stanford works very hard to secure the sensitive data entrusted to it by current and former faculty and staff,” says Livingston.  Interestingly enough, there's no mention of how the laptop was stolen or to whom it was assigned to.

Read more … Stanford News Service.

Security

Jun 09, 2008 15:25     

There should be a law that any information of a sensitiv nature such as this is not allowable on any type of portable computer with very heavy fines if found otherwise. The amount of this happening is getting out of hand.
cosmo77 report abuse vote down vote up Votes: +0

Re: Security

Jun 10, 2008 08:05     

Agreed. Sensitive information should not be stored on portable computers, since they can be easily stolen. Something needs to be done about that.
KillFrenzy report abuse vote down vote up Votes: +0

Re: Security

Jun 10, 2008 09:47     

Some basic form of encryption could help too.
nke report abuse vote down vote up Votes: +0