Department of Labor’s Bridgeport office has reported loss of confidential unemployment insurance information which has affected about 5,000 individuals and employers. The news was reported last week by the officials. The stolen laptop contains confidential information including Social Security numbers of the claimants of unemployment insurance who had problems with wage discrepancy as well as the data for certain employers in the Bridgeport region.

The department is sending notification mails to all the 5,000 affected people and employers providing them free credit.

Luckily the authorities say that the laptop is encrypted and secured by a series if passwords which would make it extremely difficult to break down the information. The records are containing Full Social Security numbers as per the rules stated by federal laws, however the SSN records are encrypted as well.

Labor Commissioner Linda Agnew said, “While we do not believe the information can be accessed from the laptop’s database and therefore used in a manner that will compromise the security of these individuals, all those potentially impacted by this crime will be offered free, full-service identity theft and credit protection”.

Threat Assessment of the incident

Since the laptop is encrypted and is protected by a series of passwords, it greatly reduces the severity and extent of attacks. But that said, one also needs to understand the type of protection mechanism used and what if the person who has conducted the theft is aware of the password himself.

However, the key highlight that we would want to make is the danger of risk has been averted to a larger degree due to encrpytion mechanism of some kind. This is exactly the point we raise on and on-going basis through our posts, analysis and news.

Get Laptop Encryption now !!

While huge sums are spent on protecting internal networks from hackers, employees are walking out the front door with laptops that not only have vast quantities of data stored on them, but also have applications connecting to internal networks and protected websites.

80% of information theft results from lost or stolen equipment. 50% of network intrusions take place using credentials from lost or stolen equipment. With laptop encryption installed, none of the information or credentials would have been lost. Try Alertsec Express now.

Related articles by Zemanta

• Cyber Security on the Road (wisebread.com)
• Why Use Data Encryption? (brighthub.com)