200,000 HP employees were taken personal information

One laptop contained information about 200,000 employees and former HP employees who were stolen last week, putting them at risk of losing their accounts or taking advantage of identity on fraudulent deals.

The stolen laptop belongs to Fidelity Investments, which provides services for HP. Inside it is sensitive information of 196,000 employees and former HP employees, including names, addresses, social insurance numbers, birth dates and more. The only salvage point is that it does not have the authentication code Fidelity requires to log in to its service.

This is the latest personal information theft that people have witnessed in the past 13 months. More than 53 million personal information got into the hands of dozens of incidents of stealing laptops or dekstop containing important data of this type. Just last month, security firm McAfee said a CD recorded thousands of old and new employees who didn't fly.

Fidelity reported back to the police and the case is still under investigation. There is no evidence that these personal information has been exploited for bad purposes, moreover, to access the information in the laptop requires a special application, which expires only a few days after the laptop disappeared. Meanwhile, the data will not be displayed normally and difficult to read and use.

Although HP tried to reassure them, these identity theft attacks made users confused and worried. They have continuously reported more than 255,000 identity theft cases about their own FTC in 2005, accounting for more than a third of all complaints and complaints.

This week, HP and Fidelity will proceed to confirm the specific names of 200,000 employees. In the meantime, Fidelity has tightened security for HP accounts and for the remaining employees a free credit monitoring service within 1 year.

Fidelity is considered one of the world's largest financial service providers with 21 million global customers.

Thien Y