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« Stolen Laptop: 3rd Theft from Boeing Since November 2005; Clear Text PII of 382,000 On the Latest | Main | Stolen Laptop: Laptop and Printouts with PII about 600 Students in Colorado »

Stolen Laptop: Cleartext Medical PII on 25,000 in Pennsylvania

On December 14 WCPO TV 9 News reported:

"A break-in in Springdale, Ohio is affecting thousands of people in Pennsylvania. The office of Electronic Registry Systems on Northland Boulevard was broken into Thanksgiving weekend and a computer was stolen. That computer had medical records on it for some 25,000 participants in a Pennsylvania health plan. Police don't suspect I.D. theft. They say, in other recent cases, the thieves wiped the computer's hard drive clean and then tried to re-sell it."

It is troubling that the police reportedly dismissed even considering the PII could be misused by the thief.

Also, it seems very unlikely a thief would wipe a hard drive clean before re-selling it...since when would thieves be concerned about protecting the privacy of the people whose data is on the computers they steal?

Also disappointing that the Office of Electronic Registry Systems apparently is not offering credit monitoring for the impacted individuals.

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Posted by Rebecca Herold on December 17, 2006 7:28 PM |

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Rebecca Herold's Bio:

Rebecca Herold,CISSP, CIPP, CISM, CISA, FLMI, has been providing information security, privacy and regulatory assistance and services to organizations from a wide range of industries for over 18 years. Rebecca was instrumental in building the information security and privacy program while at Principal Financial Group, which was awarded the CSI Information Security Program of the Year Award in 1998. IT Security ranked Rebecca as one of the top 59 IT security influencers, and Computerworld put Rebecca their list of the 25 top privacy experts and on their list of the 9 best privacy consulting firms. Rebecca has been CPO for two consulting organizations, and has had her own information privacy, security and compliance business since 2004. Rebecca has written chapters for several books, dozens of articles, and has been writing a monthly privacy column for the CSI Alert newsletter since the beginning of 2001, and is working on her 11th book. Some of her other books include The Privacy Papers, Managing an Information Security and Privacy Awareness and Training Program, The Definitive Guide to Security Inside the Perimeter (Realtime Publishers), The Shortcut Guide to Improving IT Service Support through ITIL (Realtime Publishers), and The Practical Guide to HIPAA Privacy and Security Compliance. In addition, Rebecca is the leader of The Realtime IT Compliance Community where she posts to her IT Compliance weblog. You can contact Rebecca at: rebecca_herold@realtimepublishers.net.