Endpoint Security Alert - Personal Data on 17,000 Pfizer Employees Exposed; P2P App Blamed - AlertBoot Full Disk Encryption, Software Blocking

Next Steps

Home > Newsroom > Security Alerts & Headlines

Newsroom: Security Alerts & Headlines

Personal Data on 17,000 Pfizer Employees Exposed; P2P App Blamed

An employee of Pfizer, Inc., installed unauthorized peer-to-peer file-sharing software on her company laptop and unwittingly exposed the confidential personal data - including Social Security Numbers - of approximately 17,000 current and former employees.

In response to the thousands of downloads, Pfizer is offering free credit monitoring and identity theft insurance policies to all affected employees.

SOURCE: Computerworld
DATE: June 12, 2007
LINK: http://www.computerworld.com/action/article.do?command=viewArticleBasic&articleId=9024491

The AlertBoot Endpoint Security Advantage

This situation showcases two distinct problems facing many companies:
(1) How do you prevent data from leaking out on exposed devices?
(2) How do you prevent your employees from installing and using unauthorized software?

If this computer was encrypted and protected with AlertBoot, both problems would have been easily solved. AlertBoot offers not only full hard disk encryption but also advanced content encryption. While the full disk encryption protects the entire device in the event of theft or unauthorized use, the content encryption offers "persistent encryption" for your file formats — thus ensuring that each and every spreadsheet authored, opened, or saved on a computer is fully encrypted no matter where.

Additionally, AlertBoot offers companies the ability to truly lock down computers and prevent the actual installation of non-authorized software on corporate computers.

Doing this alone would have prevented the installation of the P2P software that started the mess to begin with.