Viagra Makers' Security Not So Hard

Pfizer is a huge pharmaceutical company that, amongst many other drugs, also produces the famous blue pill, Viagra. As of late, the firm has been experiencing some problems, because of data theft as well as some workers not respecting the rules, fact which led to information leakage.

The first bad incident for this firm was in June, when, as I was saying above, someone did not take the rules seriously. One of the employees let his spouse create a peer-to-peer network and use some of the company data as shared files. Such networks, that are also known as P2P act as user-to-user and both sides involved have equal rights/responsibilities. But, even though it's called peer-to-peer, it isn't limited to just two sides, they also need a third (or central) system to control everything.

The problem is that the one that created the P2P connection shared files that regarded various aspects regarding some Pfizer employees. Data leakage consisted in personal-info about more than 17.000 actual or ex-workers, as The Register informs us.

The latest incident that affected Pfizer is someone stealing two laptops that contained yet even more data about the Pfizer employees. In any case, these employees have not been warned about this as soon as it was discovered, but almost 2 months later, Pfizer preferring to take a look into the matter first without letting them know about the issue. The theft happened at the end of May, while workers were informed of the case on the 21st of July. Anyway, all of the people affected by this breach or by the first one will receive credit monitoring (that detects any dubious activity or mishap within the Credit Report) for free, as found out from The Register.

The computers were stolen from a car and they were protected by passwords, but the information was not encrypted so there is a possibility that 950 workers' personal information could be disclosed to the criminals.