Charter Communications Inc. is notifying 9,000 current and former employees across the country that their personal information was stolen, along with the laptop that housed it, last month from a Charter Media office in South Carolina.

The theft occurred from a Greenville office on July 11 but was discovered July 14. Charter spokesman Marty Richmond said 12 laptops were stolen but only one contained sensitive data. That computer had the Social Security numbers, names and birth dates of the employees.

[Multichannel News]

Social Security numbers, pharmacy records and other personal health data from about 130,000 people covered by health insurance giant Wellpoint Inc. were left open for possible breach on the Internet, the health insurance giant confirmed Tuesday.

Wellpoint said it is not aware of any identity theft related to the problem.

Operating locally under the Unicare name, Wellpoint said customer information in several states, including Illinois, was exposed in the last year because two computer servers maintained by a vendor “were not properly secured for a period of time.” The insurer declined to name the vendor.

[Chicago Tribune]

A laptop containing sensitive and unencrypted personal data on 51,000 current and former employees of Agilent Technologies was stolen from the car of an Agilent vendor March 1 in San Francisco, the company said in a letter mailed to former employees this week.

The data includes employee names, Social Security numbers, home addresses and details of stock options and other stock-related awards.

[The Mercury News]

A hard drive containing the Social Security numbers of nearly 40,000 Georgetown students, alumni, faculty and staff was reported stolen from the office of Student Affairs on Jan. 3, potentially exposing thousands of students to identity theft.
…
The hard drive was not encrypted, meaning that information on the drive can be obtained by unauthorized parties, Lambert said. He was unsure if the hard drive was password-protected.

[The Hoya]

A laptop stolen during a recent blood drive contained sensitive information on 268,000 Minnesota-region blood donors, Memorial Blood Centers say.

The laptop was in a briefcase that was stolen just before 7 a.m. Nov. 28 as workers were setting up a blood drive, said Laura Kaplan, manager of marketing and communications with the blood center. “They were setting up for a blood drive and this was in a briefcase,” she said. “The police have told us they believe it was a random crime.”

[PC World]

About 3,000 Oahu postal employees received letters in the mail this weekend warning them that their personal information may be compromised.

The employees’ names, Social Security numbers and other information were on a laptop computer that was stolen in August.

[KITV News]

Health-care services company, McKesson, is alerting thousands of its patients that their personal information is at risk after two of its computers were stolen from an office.

The company, which helps pharmaceutical manufacturers set up assistance programs for patients in need, sent out a letter alerting patients that the computers were stolen on July 18. The names of the people being alerted were on one of the two PCs, but it’s not known how much of their accompanying identifying information was also contained on the machines.

“Your personal information may have been on one of the two computers that were stolen from a McKesson office,” wrote Patrick Blake, president of McKesson Specialty Pharmaceutical, in the letter to one patient. “At this point, we have not determined if your personal information was on either stolen computer. However, we are taking the precaution of notifying every patient whose information might have been on the computers, just to be safe.”

[Information Week]

A Loyola University computer with the Social Security numbers of 5,800 students was discarded before its hard drive was erased, forcing the school this week to warn the students about potential identify theft.

“Although we have no evidence that any of this personal information has or will be accessed, we want you to take every possible step to safeguard your privacy,” Loyola vice president and chief information officer Susan M. Malisch said in the letter.

The university will offer a year’s worth of free credit monitoring for those affected by this breach.
[Chicago Sun Times]

Two computers stolen from Yale University last month contained the Social Security numbers of about 10,000 current and former students and about 200 faculty and staff members, university officials said Wednesday.

“As it explained in the notification letters, the university does not believe that this incident presents a significant danger of identity theft because the crime was almost certainly aimed at obtaining hardware for sale _ not at exploiting the data that were on the computers,” Yale said in a statement. “Moreover, both of the computers were password-protected, and one was protected by multiple password levels, which would require considerable computer savvy to bypass.”

[Newsday]

A Louisville accounting firm’s laptop with names, Social Security numbers and birth dates of most E.On U.S. employees and some retirees was stolen last month in Chicago, according to letters to potential victims from E.On and the accounting firm.

Mountjoy & Bressler, the accounting firm, and E.On sent letters to potential identity theft victims about a week after the July 20 theft of the computer, which contained 2005 data. The data did not include addresses.

[The Courier-Journal]