14 DAY TRIAL // Piedmont Advantage, a non-profit financial institution, has announced that one of its laptops containing sensitive data about its clients cannot be located.
The company discovered on January 31 that the item could not be found and alerted law enforcement about the incident, at the same time contracting the services of third-party cyber forensics experts to investigate.
It appears that access to the mobile computer device was protected by a password, but this is no soothing news for the affected individuals because the data on the hard disk can be easily retrieved through other means.
Judy Tharp, CEO of the company, does not mention in the letter to affected individuals if the information stored on the computer was encrypted, a safety measure that would make it useless in the hands of anyone who does not have the password to unscramble it.
The CEO informs that the laptop may have included names, addresses, dates of birth, member account numbers, social security numbers, or a combination of them.
At the moment, there is no evidence that the information has been used maliciously, but out of caution, Piedmont Advantage provides the affected customers a free one-year subscription to an identity protection service.
The number of individuals impacted by the incident remains undisclosed. Piedmont Advantage has 85 shared branch locations in North Carolina and more than 5,000 locations across the US, through the Credit Union Service Center.
The services offered by the company are low-cost and range from savings and home equity loans to individual retirement accounts (IRAs).