Fergie's Tech Blog

Ernst & Young Laptop Loss Exposes 243,000 Hotels.com Customers

This is not the first (or the second, or the third, or.... etc.) time Ernst & Young has been in the news of sloppy process and disregard for privacy data protection.

Ashlee Vance writes on The Register:

Ernst & Young's laptop loss unit continues to be one of the company's more productive divisions. We learn this week that the accounting firm lost a system containing data on 243,000 Hotels.com customers. Hotels.com joins the likes of Sun Microsystems, IBM, Cisco, BP and Nokia, which have all had their employees' data exposed by Ernst & Young, as revealed here in a series of exclusive stories.

The Register can again exclusively confirm the loss of the Hotels.com customer information after having received a copy of a letter mailed out jointly by the web site and Ernst & Young. A Hotels.com spokesman also confirmed the data breach, saying Ernst & Young notified the company of the laptop loss on May 3. The laptop in question was stolen from an Ernst & Young worker's car in Texas and did have some basic data protection mechanisms.

posted by Fergie @ 6/01/2006 04:48:00 PM