Hotels.com Customer Data Stolen - Yahoo! News: "Since the theft, however, Ernst & Young has encrypted data on all laptops within its U.S. and Canadian operations, Kerrigan said."
Since the theft? Yup. 243,000 customers. Credit card info. Yadda, yadda. Starting to sound depressingly familiar, isn't it?
Also depressingly familiar is the delay - laptop stolen from a parked car in late February, Hotels.com notified May 3, customers begin to be notified a month later. (Not that it matters much. Since I used Hotels.com - once, possibly in the time frame affected - I've become so used to deleting their incessant email that if they tried to notify me that way I would have trashed it unseen.) Alas.
Boys and girls: Listen. It is not difficult to encrypt the sensitive data on your laptop or desktop computer. Here's a Windows application that does it. On a Mac, just create an encrypted disk image using Disk Utility (it's in the Utilities folder), give it a nice strong password, and you're good to go. Or use Filevault, which does the same thing to your whole Home folder.
It's not rocket science. It's not even computer science, really. It's just common sense.
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