Take away Ernst & Young employee laptops
- IT TOPICS:Security
You would think that after all the press on laptops being lost, stolen, etc., that Ernst & Young would have impressed upon their employees the importance of not letting those laptops out of eye sight. According to this exclusive, another laptop has been stolen out of an Ernst & Young employee's car in Texas.
The laptop did have some security mechanisms, but none of them difficult to circumvent. The data that resided on that laptop was Hotel.com's customer information, such as name, address, credit card information. According to the story, Hotel.com's clientele list includes employees of some rather large companies, such as Sun Microsystems, IBM, and Cisco.
The thing I find so disconcerting, is this is Ernst & Young, a big audit and security consulting company. These are the guys you trust with your corporate information. I understand that most of their people do field work, travel 90% of the time, and need those laptops to do their jobs, so what's the answer? Pull all those laptops in from the field. Either reconfigure them or replace them with fully encryptable hard drives. Maybe until that can be done, provide each mobile employee with handcuffs and require them to handcuff the laptop to their wrists whenever they go anywhere. The laptop goes with you into the Starbucks, the bathroom, the wherever you go, so goes your laptop.
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