Gap Job Applicants' Data Stolen

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GAP Inc. just announced that a laptop containing the personal information of about 800,000 job applicants, including social security numbers, was stolen from a third-party vendor. If you’ve recently applied for a job at the Gap, you might want to find out if your information was on that laptop.

The San Francisco-based retailer said it has begun notifying on Thursday those applicants whose Social Security numbers were included in the information on the laptop. "Gap Inc. deeply regrets this incident occurred. We take our obligation to protect the data security of personal information very seriously," Gap CEO Glenn Murphy, said in a statement.
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This excuse is just getting rediculous! Yet another "laptop" with hundreds of thousands of records on them? Anyone ever heard of a server? It reminds me of when CEO's got their hands caught in the cookie jar only to exclaim "accounting irregularities!" It is BS and I sincerly hope that these corporations have to pay a punitive fine of at least $1000 per lost record compromised. An $800 million fine should stop this crap today! :cool:
 
Yes this is criminal negligence. If I were on of those many I'd be consulting a lawyer right about now.

At any rate, data servers do have their uses. The most relevant here being a physically secure location whereby it cannot be easily stolen. Even if they persisted on not using a server, some form of HDD encryption should have been utilized. No excuse not to be safe with others' private information.
 
Seriously, I don't get these corporations. Why and the hell is someone walking around with 800,000 applicants data on a LAPTOP? WTF!? That is totally unacceptable and has been totally unacceptable since the first reported issue. Get a SAN, a NAS, some type of central storage or at the very least don't allow the computer with the applicant information to be portable - Jebus...
 
Spacy9 said:
Seriously, I don't get these corporations. Why and the hell is someone walking around with 800,000 applicants data on a LAPTOP? WTF!? That is totally unacceptable and has been totally unacceptable since the first reported issue. Get a SAN, a NAS, some type of central storage or at the very least don't allow the computer with the applicant information to be portable - Jebus...
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There was an article on the front page a few months ago addressing this issue. Basically, it said many IT groups put the infrastructure in place to prevent this, and there are rules on not having "checked out" data on a laptop like that. Employees simply ignore all this and keep a local copy of the data anyways because it runs faster.
 
On the bright side, if you're applying at the Gap chances are you don't have much to lose.
 
Ok, this is getting rediculous. WTF are these people doing walking around with sensitive data? If a worker needs access while away from the office, do it through a Citrix\Terminal Server session or secure web site (yeah I know, is there really such a thing). These things simply should not happen as often as they do if at all.
 
was stolen from a third-party vendor.
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So what was this third party vendor, maybe gap is not directly responsible for this (yes they are somewhat cause its their data) but what if the laptop was busted and would not boot and was being repaired.

Personally i wouldn't jump on the hate GAP thing till i know more.
 
I work at Gap HQ in SF and I can tell you that the security precautions are conservative to the point of being draconian. This would not be an issue if it were a Gap-issued laptop. Unfortunately the firm that handles field/store HR is the culprit here.
 
tesfaye said:
Ok, this is getting rediculous. WTF are these people doing walking around with sensitive data? If a worker needs access while away from the office, do it through a Citrix\Terminal Server session or secure web site (yeah I know, is there really such a thing). These things simply should not happen as often as they do if at all.
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You'd be shocked by the gaping holes in policy in a lot of these big corporations. I've seen insane precautions taken to protect all of the "audited" systems while doing stupid things like copying production data (unsanitized) to the dev and test systems that every Tom, Dick and Harry have access to. Then that data ends up on developer laptops. (why not? The data is just from a test machine.) The laptops get downloaded to home machines (because they'd rather work at home with their bigger monitors and their own tools). So now all of your client data is floating around on laptops, but it's also on home systems that aren't under any sort of scrutiny and there's a nice big client data file sitting in the directory that's right next to a developers Bittorrent upload directory. Then you add in the issue of contractors, vendors investigating problems, temp employees, pissed off ex-employees, cleaners in the office buildings, etc.

I'm actually shocked that this isn't reported a lot more often than it is. Once your data is given to anyone, you should just assume that it's no longer 100% private. The only defense is to live in a cave or just be vigilant in reviewing your credit card statements and sign up with some sort of credit reporting agency. Also, if you do find a problem, aggressively pursue the leak and try to get it closed up.
 
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