Boeing laptop with data on 382,000 employees stolen

The information included employees' Social Security numbers, home addresses, telephone numbers and birth dates, as well as salary information, Neale said. Although the laptop was turned off and was password protected, Neale said the data on it was not encrypted.

Neale said Boeing is working with law enforcement officials to try and recover the laptop and noted that the company began notifying the affected people on Tuesday. Boeing is strongly suggesting that they sign up for a credit monitoring service, which the company will pay for, he said.

Neale declined to provide details about the ramifications of the theft for the employee involved in this incident. But he did say that the worker had violated several company policies.

The laptop was the third stolen from Boeing in approximately a year, Neale confirmed. In November 2005, a Boeing laptop containing personal data on approximately 160,000 current and former employees was taken. And in April, a laptop containing the personal information on 3,600 employees and retirees was stolen.

Although none of the laptops has yet been recovered, Neale said there's been no indication that any information on them has been compromised.

After the first incident, Neale said Boeing installed encryption software on employees' laptops so that when they saved confidential data to their hard drives, the data could be encrypted. Unfortunately, Neale said, most employees don't use the software, prompting Boeing to now look for ways to automatically encrypt confidential data on employee computers.

Because 90,000 of the affected individuals live in the state of Washington, Attorney General Rob McKenna issued a statement urging residents whose personal information was stored on the stolen Boeing laptop to protect themselves against identity theft.

"Former and current Boeing employees affected by the recent security breach should be aware that they have several options available to help protect them against identity theft," McKenna said. "They can request a credit report security freeze, place a fraud alert with the credit-reporting agencies or continue to monitor their statements without taking further action."

In the statement, McKenna said Boeing notified his office about the theft yesterday. A spokesman for McKenna declined to say whether the theft occurred in Washington.

In a separate incident, the University of Texas at Dallas said yesterday that the personal information of 6,000 individuals employed by the school between 1999 and 2005 may have had sensitive information exposed by a computer network intrusion.

That information may include names and Social Security numbers, and, in some cases, addresses, e-mail addresses and telephone numbers.

University IT staff discovered that intrusion on Sunday. The university said there has been no indication that the information has been disclosed, disseminated or misused.

The individuals whose information may be in danger includes students, faculty and applicants for admission at the Erik Jonsson School of Engineering and Computer Science dating back as far back as 1993. The breach could also affect staff and faculty of the university who were employed between January 1999 and August 2005.

The university said it is in the process of contacting individuals whose information could have been exposed.

In a third unrelated security breach, thieves on Oct. 26 broke into an office building occupied by an Aetna vendor, Concentra Preferred Systems, and stole a lockbox containing the personal information of 130,000 health insurance customers. The information included member names, hospital codes, and either Social Security numbers or Aetna member ID numbers. The Social Security numbers of about 750 medical professionals were also exposed, according to a statement

According to the statement, law enforcement authorities believe that -- based on the nature of the crime and the items taken from the six businesses -- this was an act by thieves looking for cash and other property to pawn.

Concentra said it believes it's unlikely that data from the backup tapes could be successfully accessed because of a complex combination of commercial equipment, plus special versions of backup and database software packages needed to read the data, which is in unlabeled formats and difficult to understand. These tapes cannot be used on a standard PC, Concentra said.