[jyl]

I was at an investment conference yesterday in SF, and my bag with the company laptop was stolen.

(Which is an unheard-of event, actually. The room was crowded with analysts, portfolio managers, and company CEOs and CFOs. While some of these people may be thieves, they usually have ambitions higher than petty thievery.)

I immediately called the IT dept and had them shut down my VPN and network login. And they had a new laptop with all applications loaded and ready for me 2 hours later (our IT guys are great).

The laptop had almost entirely work information on it, and none of that would be useful/damaging to anyone. But it did also have my 2006 tax return, and hence my family's names, addresses, SSNs, and income. Plus the Internet Explorer had bookmarks for our financial accounts, with the userid but fortunately not the passwords. Anyone who can get through the Windows logon, or simply pull the hard drive, can get at this information.

Thus I am having to place a 7 year fraud block on all our credit files as well as notifying all our financial accounts and credit cards to watch for unusual activity. Plus I will have to re-do my taxes. And someone out there potentially knows a lot about me.

So, lesson learned - if you carry any sensitive information on your laptop, consider sofware to encrypt those files.

My new work laptop has the entire hard drive encrypted, plus we will start using the embedded fingerprint readers.

And if you come across an IBM X60 S/N LVG0196 for sale . . .