VeriSign laptop with employee data stolen

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Digital certificate issuing company VeriSign suffered a data breach when an employee's laptop was stolen from their car last month.

News of the theft has only now come to light and according to a letter leaked to a blog called "Wizbang", VeriSign told both present and former employees that the laptop was possibly stolen by a random thief between 12 July and 13 July from a garage in Northern California.

The laptop contained names, social security numbers, dates of birth, salary details, phone numbers and addresses of of VeriSign employees, according to a letter sent to workers and ex-workers of the company.

In a media statement, VeriSign said that it was taking the laptop theft very seriously and had started an internal investigation as soon as the theft was discovered.

The company said that it had "no reason to believe that the thief or thieves acted with the intent to extract and use this information. The local police have said the theft may be tied to a series of neighbourhood burglaries."

The employee involved in this incident has since left VeriSign.

Encryption experts said that companies need to take note of the number of security breaches reported of late.

"The VeriSign laptop theft is another in the long line of serious data security breaches and one has to ask why we are not learning?" said Tom De Jongh, product manager at data security and encryption company SafeBoot. "There are no end of security warnings in the media with laptop thefts from Marks and Spencer, Nationwide, the Metropolitan Police, Serco and now VeriSign, and these examples are just the tip of the iceberg."

He said that companies such as VeriSign, a security vendor, should be setting the standard not creating good examples of what not to do. "Not only has this created massive security implications for individuals, but is a huge embarrassment to the company," he said.

De Jongh said that the theft of a laptop from a VeriSign employee has left vulnerable information in the public domain.

"It can be tricky to prevent the theft of a laptop, but all that would be required to prevent the data being on display is a little bit of common sense," he said.

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