(Associated Press via Newsedge) Alcatel-Lucent said it is reviewing security procedures and has halted use of couriers for sending personnel information after a computer disk with financial and other data on employees and retirees went missing.
The firm said it is trying to recover the disk by working with the courier used to ship it and two outside vendors involved in the shipment. The company also notified the New Jersey State Police and the US Secret Service.
The disk was either lost or stolen sometime between April 5 and May 3. It holds names, addresses, Social Security numbers, birth dates and salary data for thousands of employees, retirees and dependents on the company's U.S. payroll, said Peter Benedict, a spokesman at the company's North American headquarters.
Credit card numbers and bank account information were not on the disk.
It affects only those who worked for Lucent Technologies before it was acquired by Paris-based Alcatel in December, the company said.
'We've now requested that all our vendors suspend all similar transmissions of personal information by a courier while we investigate,' he said. 'We're reviewing our security procedures to make sure all secure information is protected.'
According to Benedict, Hewitt Associates, a consultant to Alcatel-Lucent on health care benefits, created a disk with the information and shipped the disk via UPS to another outside vendor, Aon.
He said it was going from a Hewitt office in Bridgewater to an Aon office in Somerset. Aon does employee benefits consulting for Alcatel-Lucent.
Aon spokesman Al Orendorff said that the circumstances of how and when the CD-ROM disk vanished are unknown.
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