Fergie's Tech Blog

40,000 BP Workers Exposed in (Yet Another) Ernst & Young Laptop Loss

Ashlee Vance writes on The Register:

Like sands through the hourglass, these are The Days of Ernst & Young laptop loss. Yes, friends, The Register can confirm that BP has been added to the list of Ernst & Young customers whose personal data has been exposed after a laptop theft. BP joins Sun Microsystems, Cisco and IBM in this not so exclusive club.

Ernst & Young has sent out a letter to all 38,000 BP employees in the US, telling them that a laptop theft had exposed their names and social security numbers. To keep the BP staff's mind at ease, Ernst & Young said that the file name containing their info did not indicate what type of information was on the laptop, and the laptop was password protected. Phew!

Ernst & Young confirmed that this is the very same laptop that held data on the Sun, Cisco and IBM workers. All of these data losses were revealed by us in a set of exclusive stories. Ernst & Young also recently lost four more laptops in Miami, although it has not said which customers were affected in those incidents.

posted by Fergie @ 3/24/2006 07:13:00 AM