It was revealed today that Pfizer might be in trouble again after they reported another potential data breach–this one affecting over 13,000 company employees. Like several other recent id thefts, this one was initiated by the theft of a company laptop that contained employee records. On the bright side, this time, was that there weren’t any social security numbers stored on the stolen laptop.

An employee was quoted as saying, “How many … times does this have to happen before someone figures out that the people being given access to this info are clearly incompetent and incapable of keeping it secure?”. I’ll go ahead and answer that for you–a LOT. This seems to happen all the time and it’s not just Pfizer that has some incompetent people being charged with safeguarding the identities of their employees.

Although Pfizer has said they’re now going to start encrypting all laptops, this is hardly going to prevent similar problems from arising in the future–like their employee correctly pointed out, when the people in charge of ensuring the safe handling of information can’t be counted upon to be responsible in doing their jobs all of the encryption and upper-level decisions aren’t going to do any good at all. To be cliché about it, an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure, but when you can’t even get an ounce of prevention into the right hands…well, then you’re going to be paying for a lot more pounds of cure; tons of cure (if you will).

Now, Pfizer has coupled these efforts with mandatory training for both employees and contractors covering the importance of data security so they’re taking the right steps but shouldn’t they have done this before the first incident last year–or at least before the most recent breach? We all make mistakes, both as individuals and as corporations, but come on, we all have enough to worry about that having to expend our mental energy on having safe identities because we have a job is really just ridiculous.

Fortunately there are several identity theft companies that provide large-scale solutions for companies in situations like Pfizer including Lifelock and their main competitor, Debix. Lifelock has been called upon in many previous cases to put locks down on the credit of affected employees to ensure no harm comes from the theft of private data.

Tags: debix, lifelock, pfizer

This entry was posted on Tuesday, May 13th, 2008 at 10:39 am and is filed under Corporate Breaches. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.