According to the Associated Press, a thief recently stole a laptop from the University of California at Berkeley, which contains personal information about nearly 100,000 alumni, graduate students and past applicants. Information contained on the laptop includes names and Social Security numbers dating back to 1976.

Recently there were several similar security breaches reported involving loss of a large amount of personal data, including ChoicePoint Inc., a consumer data firm duped into distributing personal information about 145,000 people; Lexis-Nexis, where computer hackers obtained access to the personal information of 32,000 people; and Chico State University, where a computer hacking job exposed 59,000 people to potential identity theft.

This entry was posted by Qingfeng () on Wednesday, April 6th, 2005 at 10:17 pm and is filed under Identity Theft. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.

Note: Blog posts are the opinions of their authors and do not reflect the official opinion of the National Science Foundation or North Carolina State University.