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    Data Breach Hits Google Employees

    By
    John Pallatto
    -
    July 3, 2008
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      Reports have been trickling out of Silicon Valley of a potentially major personal data breach affecting Google employees.

      But the data breach didn’t result from cunning hackers penetrating a vulnerable corporate network. It’s just another case of computers getting up and walking as a result of an old-fashioned burglary.

      Valleywag reported July 2 on its Web site that Google employees hired before Dec. 31, 2005, received notices that their personal data, including Social Security numbers and birth dates had been compromised by a break-in at Colt Express Outsourcing Services, a payroll and human resources outsourcing company.

      The Valleywag report says the break-in occurred at Colt Express on May 26 and Google informed employees on June 9 about the breach. As a result, employees are getting a free year of identity theft protection.

      Google employees looking to get an explanation from Colt Express will find the company’s Web site is no help. The site only reports that the “home page will be reconstructed.”

      The likely reason for the Colt Express site being down is that Ceridian, the giant payroll processing and human resources company that serves more than 25 million employees, announced in early February 2008 that it had acquired “certain assets” from Colt Express. Ceridian’s benefits services division is now providing services to Colt’s clients.

      This latest case demonstrates again that poor physical security is a more prevalent cause of data breaches than remote hacking attacks. Most of the biggest data breaches reported over the past couple of years have resulted from laptop computers being lost or stolen.

      This means that the solution to these problems is a combination of improved physical security at business offices of all kinds to make it harder to steal computers and new data protection services that attempt to erase or block access to storage disks after computers have been stolen.

      On June 30, Dell started offering a set of services for its business computers that not only try to track missing or stolen laptops, but also attempt to remotely erase sensitive corporate data from a hard disk drive.

      Such services are likely to become more prevalent as corporate IT managers learn that they haven’t truly secured employee and customer data until they implement some kind of effective system that tries to block access to data contained on the hard disks of lost and stolen computers.

      John Pallatto
      John Pallatto has been editor in chief of QuinStreet Inc.'s eWEEK.com since October 2012. He has more than 40 years of experience as a professional journalist working at a daily newspaper and computer technology trade journals. He was an eWEEK managing editor from 2009 to 2012. From 2003 to 2007 he covered Enterprise Application Software for eWEEK. From June 2007 to 2008 he was eWEEK’s West Coast news editor. Pallatto was a member of the staff that launched PC Week in March 1984. From 1992 to 1996 he was PC Week’s West Coast Bureau chief. From 1996 to 1998 he was a senior editor with Ziff-Davis Internet Computing Magazine. From 2000 to 2002 Pallatto was West Coast bureau chief with Internet World Magazine. His professional journalism career started at the Hartford Courant daily newspaper where he worked from 1974 to 1983.

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