Commerce Dept. Loses 1,137 Laptops
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In advance of a House Committee on Government Reform hearing, in which the matter would have come up anyway, the U.S. Commerce Dept. disclosed in a private briefing yesterday that it believes as many as 1,137 laptop computers have been lost since 2001.
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Administaff, a provider of human resources services, is notifying 159,000 former and current workers that personal data about them was on a laptop reported missing on Oct. 3. The data was unencrypted.
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A computer screen upgrade has crashed 80,000 government terminals at the Department for Work and Pensions in the UK. EDS and Microsoft (NASDAQ: MSFT) were blamed.
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A stolen laptop computer containing  sensitive information on more than 26 million U.S. military  veterans and service members has been recovered and a  preliminary review indicated no data was taken, the FBI and  Veterans Affairs Department said on Thursday.
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(InfoWorld) - A government audit of four U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) centers found $6.4 million worth of missing or misplaced IT equipment, according to a report released Tuesday. Inventories in fiscal years 2005 and 2006 found about 2,400 missing IT devices at the four VA locations, the U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO) report said. Among the missing items were dozens of computers that could have stored personal information. The GAO also found computer hard drives being disposed containing the names, Social Security numbers, or medical histories of hundreds of U.S. military veterans. About 28 percent of the IT equipment at the VA medical center in Washington, D.C., was missing or misplaced, the GAO said. The missing equipment in the new GAO report is in addition to an earlier audit showing more than 8,600 missing IT items, with a combined original cost of $13.2 million, from five other VA centers, the GAO said. There is an "overall lack of accountability" for IT equipment at the VA locations, said McCoy Williams, director of financial management and assurance at GAO. The GAO found a "pervasive" lack of personal accountability at all four locations, he told the U.S. House of Representatives Veterans Affairs Committee's Subcommittee on Oversight and Investigations. "Missing IT items were not reported for several months and, in some cases, for several years," Williams told the subcommittee. In some cases, hard drives scheduled to be disposed of sat around for several years without being wiped clean, "creating an unnecessary risk that sensitive personal and medical information could be compromised," Williams added. The VA's IT practices have been the target of frequent criticism by U.S. lawmakers in recent years. The agency, in May 2006, reported that a laptop and hard drive containing the personal records of 26.5 million military veterans and family members was stolen from an employee's home. Police later recovered the equipment, and the VA said the records did not appear to be compromised. Subcommittee members called on the VA to improve its inventory management. "We know that VA has serious problems keeping track of its IT inventory," said Rep. Harry Mitchell, subcommittee chairman and Arizona Democrat. "This is not just a dollar issue. It is also a security and privacy issue." The VA is implementing new IT equipment management procedures and, after a three-month process, has found about 90 percent of the missing equipment, said Robert Howard, the VA's assistant secretary for information and technology. "The lack of accountability was clearly evident," said Howard, who became the agency's CIO in September 2006. "You shouldn't have to go through that to find your equipment." The VA has issued a new equipment handbook, and employees now have to sign for equipment in their control, Howard said. The VA has concurred on all 12 GAO recommendations for inventory management, VA officials said. The VA is also deploying network monitoring software that can scan for devices, Howard said. "This is a critically important issue," Howard said. "This is a situation of utmost importance. It is a situation we are working hard to remedy."
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Some 80,000 computers at the Department for Work and Pensions went down during &#39;a routine software upgrade&#39; of its Microsoft machines this week.
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The U.S. Commerce Department has admitted that more than 1,100 laptop computers have gone missing in the last five years, including almost 250 from the Census Bureau.
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A cyber attack on the Pentagon Wednesday forced the Defense Department to shut down about 1,500 computers after its systems detected a possible compromise, it said Thursday.
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InfoWorld - Although a report indicates the world&#39;s largest PC vendor may be cutting back on some orders to PC manufacturers for the third and fourth quarters of this year, an executive at the company said the problem isn&#39;t in laptop PCs.
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More and more resellers of used computer equipment are charging to erase data that may still be left on hard drives.
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VALLEY FORGE, Pa. - A computer network outage at The Vanguard Group, which manages $1.1 trillion in mutual fund assets, temporarily left customers unable to access online accounts Thursday afternoon.
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IBM (NYSE: IBM) is recalling some 553,000 power adapters used with the company's ThinkPad laptop computers sold worldwide between January 1999 and August 2000.
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By Frank Norton, The News & Observer, Raleigh, N.C.  Jun. 2--For some tech workers, the bust is back.   Technology companies -- including several with major North Carolina operations: IBM, Lenovo and Dell -- are trimming their U.S.
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A computer tape containing personal data of 650,000 customers of about 230 retailers including J.C. Penney Co is missing, credit card issuer GE Money said on Friday.
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By Michael Sluss, The Roanoke Times, Va.  Jun. 21--RICHMOND -- Two hardware failures in the state's central computer system forced Department of Motor Vehicles offices to close early Wednesday and created problems for other government agencies.
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The US Consumer Product Safety Commission has announced a voluntary recall of 990,000 AC adapters distributed by Round Rock-based Dell Inc.
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Dell Inc. DELL.O will recall about  990,000 power adapters for some of its laptop computer models  because of a risk of overheating which could lead to a fire or  electrical shock, the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission  said on Friday.