A laptop computer containing unprotected information on 13,000 current and former ING Financial Services employees was stolen from an agent’s home on June 12. According to ING, the laptop was neither password protected nor featured data encryption, which may put the employees whose data was contained on the machine at serious risk of identity theft.
ING is the latest in a long list of financial services and public sector organizations to publicly admit to the theft of unsecured IT equipment. The company says it has notified all affected employees and that the agent who lost the machine was not breaking security policies by having unecnrypted data on his laptop.
