Identities of Stanford University Employees at Risk

Stanford University sent notification to tens of thousands of past and current employees that their personal information and identity is at risk because of a single stolen laptop that contained their personal information. The laptop was not encrypted.

A Stanford spokesman said that the stolen laptop contained personal information, including birth dates, social security numbers, and home addresses of people hired by the university before September 28th, 2007. According to the university this could be as many as 72,000 individuals.

Stanford has become the latest in a series of organizations to suffer a public relations nightmare - from Wells Fargo Bank to the US Department of Veterans Affairs – because of  a security breaches from a single stolen laptop. The sad fact here is that as the trustee of the personal information given to it, Stanford University has failed tens of thousands of people and put their financial identity at risk of being abused.