Auditor Loses McAfee Employee Data; Thousands at Risk of ID Theft

By Michael Santo
Contributing Writer, RealTechNews

So ironic, I had to post it. Of course McAfee isn’t in the business of ID Theft prevention per se, threats like phishing scams are in their purview, and that can lead to ID theft. Of course, it wasn’t McAfee themself that lost the data, it was an external auditor, Deloitte & Touche USA.

The disc contained personal details on all current U.S. and Canadian McAfee workers hired prior to April 2005 and on about 6,000 former employees in the same region, (McAfee spokeswoman Siobhan) MacDermott said. (The security company currently has approximately 3,290 employees worldwide.) The information wasn’t encrypted and potentially includes names, Social Security numbers and stock holdings in McAfee.

Deloitte & Touche confirmed the incident. “A Deloitte & Touche employee left an unlabelled backup CD in an airline seat pocket,” a representative for the professional services firm said. “We are not aware of any unauthorized access to this data in the two months since the CD was lost.” Source: ZDNet

We Say: It’s amazing … and scary how often this sort of thing happens. I recall UPS losing some data not that long ago and someone leaving a laptop in a car. That’s just the tip of the iceberg. It happens too often. It’s this sort of thing that has made me subscribe to a credit monitoring service by one of the three credit bureaus. So much of this happens, free reports aren’t enough. I want real-time monitoring.