Have you ever gone to the mall or a clothing store to apply for a job ? If so, which one was it? Could you have been one of the estimated 800,000 that were exposed when a laptop was stolen from a contractor who manages data for a major clothing retail store?

Data on this laptop included personal sensitive data of many who applied for work at Old Navy, Gap and Banana Republic. Those affected would have applied to work at one of these stores between July 2006 and June 2007, according to Gap. A small amount of relief can be found in the fact that not all applicants during this time period were affected. The company did use several contractors to manage their data during that time.

Of course, as in most cases, the company is doing all they can to find out how they can prevent this type of data breach in the future, however, the personal data of hundreds of thousands is now in the wrong hands and it has also been reported that the data was not encrypted, which is against Gap policy. This incident was reported immediately upon notice of the missing computer.

This entry was posted on Thursday, August 28th, 2008 at 7:34 am and is filed under Data Breach. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.