Boeing fires employee whose laptop was stolen

Boeing, the giant aerospace company, has fired an employee who had a very important laptop stolen. The computer contained the personal information of approximately 400,000 current and retired company employees. The data had been downloaded from company servers and was not encrypted.

The unnamed employee had the laptop stolen out of his/her car and failed to encrypt the data which violates company policy. The personal data included names, phone numbers, salary information, birth dates, and even Social Security numbers.

Boeing says there was a boot-up password set on the laptop, but anyone with basic computer skills can just rip the hard-drive out of the laptop and extract the data with another computer.

The stolen laptop has not yet been recovered.