LifeLock Blog

Baylor Health Care System is sending letters to the 100,000 patients whose personal information was on a laptop stolen from an employee’s car in September.

The Social security numbers of 7,400 of the patients were stored on the computer. For most of the patients, their information was limited to their names and medical codes.

The incident occurred when a manager, who has since been fired, left the laptop in her car. She had been using the laptop to take patient histories as she traveled from one health care facility to another. The manager was permitted to use the laptop for that purpose, but it was against Baylor Health Care System policy to ever leave the laptop in an unattended car.

Even before this incident, Baylor was upgrading their information security with new software that would enable them to track lost or stolen laptops, and to erase data from the computers remotely if the need ever arose.

Lost and stolen laptops (and other mobile data devices such as thumb drives and PDAs) are the most common cause of data breaches.

Since January 2005, at least 250 million records have been lost or stolen in data breaches. Experts agree that there is no longer a question of “if” someone will become a victim of identity breach, but rather it’s a question of “when”.