Fidelity Lost What???

Someone at Fidelity lost a laptop.  One laptop.  It happened to have the names, social security numbers, and accounts of all of Hewlett Packards 196,000 pension fund owners.  Oops.

That will cost Fidelity $50,000 just in stamps to tell those 196,000 about the fact that they may have an issue.  How much will it cost them in goodwill?  I'm not sure it's calculable among that crowd - or the millions that have seen it on TV - mercilessly over the last 24 hours.  How much will it cost to offer them a free year of credit service bureau service?  $10 each?  That's $2,000,000 more.

The irony is Fidelity claims that the laptop was loaded up with those names so they would be prepared for a meeting with HP, to discuss the pension plan.  Fabulous.

How much would it cost to put encryption on that laptop?  About a hundred bucks.  You wanna bet how many other places those names are located at Fidelity?  A lot I'm guessing.  How many backup tapes have those names?  How many replica's exist of the volumes where those names reside on file servers in some spreadsheet?  A gazillion? 

This was going to happen - the numbers alone mean it's inevitable.  Stop being naive.  This is going to happen at your shop too.  Fidelity is considered the gold standard as far as IT goes - and they just coughed up a hairball.  Do you really think it's not going to happen to you?

I'll be back to start tossing ideas about dealing with this kind of stuff later.  I gotta go stuff my mattress with my money first.