Hardware containing personal information on about 88,000 patients of the Staten Island University Hospital has been stolen last year in December.

According to Silive.com, after four months of investigations that have led to no arrest, the hospital administrators are now starting to send letter to patients who are currently exposed to identity theft threats. The stolen desktop computer and the backup hard drive stolen from one of the hospital’s finance offices contained patients’ names, Social Security and health insurance numbers.

“The hospital is in the process of issuing a letter of information to each patient involved in which one year of free credit monitoring is being offered,” said a hospital statement released yesterday afternoon by spokeswoman Arleen Ryback. The time frame for when patients whose information was included in the data were treated was not immediately known.

Ms. Ryback said no medical records were included in the files, but wouldn’t speculate why SIUH waited so long to notify people.

Stolen or lost hardware, from laptops to USB sticks and portable hard drives, were the most common cause of data breaches in 2007, outranking malicious software. These findings have been recently released by Symantec in its latest Internet Security Threat Report. As SecurityFocus shows, this is a significant conclusion, given that the number of unique variants of malicious software more than quadrupled in 2007.

the theft of computers and storage devices, not malicious code, accounted for the majority of lost data. In the latter half of the year, such physical theft accounted for 57 percent of data breaches, up from 46 percent in the first half of 2007, the report stated. While the government had only the second highest number of breaches — 20 percent of the total compared to 24 percent for the education sector — those breaches accounted for 60 percent of identity theft, the report stated.