Tech Shout!

Financial services company Fidelity Investments, on Wednesday, revealed that the company’s laptop which contained personal information of 1,96,000 current and former employees of Hewlett Packard was stolen last week. It seems that the unpleasant incident took place when Fidelity employees were working at an off-site location.

The laptop contained key information such as the names, addresses, social security numbers, dates of birth, and employment information. PINs for the employees’ Fidelity accounts were not part of this data. However, the amount of information lost is likely more than enough to pose a potential identity theft threat.

As an additional feature to protect data on these machines, Fidelity adds a special application that encrypts data after an expiration date. To add to Fidelity’s distress, this application expired the day after the laptop was stolen.

The authorities have been alerted to the loss, Fidelity said. Authorities are sighting the possibility that most probably the laptop would be stolen with the intention of stealing the machine and the purpose of the theft may not be to view the highly confidential data, due to which the contents would most likely be deleted to resell the machine

Fidelity said that it had not received any reports of potential data misuse. Fidelity as well as Hewlett Packard are now cautioning affected employees, and Fidelity will offer those individuals free credit monitoring for a period of one year.

Data loss is becoming an increasingly bigger problem. Nearly 53 million personal records have been exposed in the past year or so in incidents like this, says the Privacy Rights Clearinghouse.

However, by the same token, studies have shown in most cases, much of the data is never used. This is due to the amount of time it takes to apply for credit accounts, which is usually on the order of 10 to 15 minutes per application.