Laptop with Private Data Stolen from Kraft Foods Employee
A laptop has been recently stolen from a Kraft Foods staffer doing some business traveling. The computer in question contained the private data of 20,000 US-based employees who were then informed they ran the risk of having their identities stolen.
According to Kraft Foods spokesman Cathy Pernu, quoted by Quad-City Times, the theft was reported in mid-January. The data stored on the stolen laptop was to be transferred on a different computer. It contained employee names and it is possible to also have stored social security numbers. Kraft on the other hand believes the private records were not obtained by anyone and then state the stored information wasn’t used for any malicious purposes.
The company is now trying to offer retroactive protection to those affected. It seems protecting data pro-actively would have had better results:
We have contacted people whose names were on the computer, by letter, offering as a precaution, free credit monitoring … to help guard against improper use of personal information. It is a two-year program,” she said.
Only those who were potentially affected and received letters are being offered the credit monitoring program through TransUnion.
