Charter Communications has announced that twelve laptops—out of which one of them contained sensitive personal information—were stolen over the weekend of July 11.  Charter seems to have declined to answer any questions on what type of data security programs they were using to protect the information found on those laptops—or at least the one laptop with the sensitive information.  It sounds like perhaps laptop encryption,  a service offered by AlertBoot among others, was not used to secure the data.

The data in question are the details of 9,000 current and former employees.  Potentially breached information includes names, dates of birth, and Social Security numbers.  Charter has offered one year of free credit protection—and strongly recommended that employees take it up.  (A sign that information security software was not used?  Or just a company looking after the welfare of its employees?)

Hmph.  I guess there’s a certain logic to that.  I mean, who’s to guarantee that credit protection services won’t get hacked?  Or that some employee will download sensitive data to his or her laptop and lose it, never mind the policies at those companies?  I mean, Choicepoint—a data aggregator—was involved in quite the massive data breach in 2004.

At the same time, credit protection companies cannot protect you if they don’t know what to look for (well, assuming they’re there to protect you)—so providing sensitive information is de rigeur.

Related Articles:

http://www.forbes.com/feeds/ap/2008/08/13/ap5319900.html

http://money.cnn.com/news/newsfeeds/articles/apwire/1fddc15e2bb5302e7df9caa844a74c5e.htm

http://www.multichannel.com/article/CA6587530.html?industryid=47199

http://www.wyff4.com/news/17177025/detail.html