[Dataloss] Ernst & Young Laptop Loss Exposes 243, 000 Hotels.com Customers

[lyger]

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2006/06/01/ey_hotels_laptop/

Ernst & Young's laptop loss unit continues to be one of the company's more 
productive divisions. We learn this week that the accounting firm lost a system 
containing data on 243,000 Hotels.com customers. Hotels.com joins the likes of 
Sun Microsystems, IBM, Cisco, BP and Nokia, which have all had their employees' 
data exposed by Ernst & Young, as revealed here in a series of exclusive 
stories.

The Register can again exclusively confirm the loss of the Hotels.com customer 
information after having received a copy of a letter mailed out jointly by the 
web site and Ernst & Young. A Hotels.com spokesman also confirmed the data 
breach, saying Ernst & Young notified the company of the laptop loss on May 3. 
The laptop in question was stolen from an Ernst & Young worker's car in Texas 
and did have some basic data protection mechanisms.

"Recently, Hotels.com was informed by its outside auditor, Ernst & Young, 
that one of Ernst & Young's employees had his laptop computer stolen," 
Hotels.com told its customers in the letter.

[...]