The accounting firm Ernst & Young has recently lost five laptops containing confidential data. An Ernst & Young spokesman has confirmed that one laptop had tens of thousands of Sun, Cisco, IBM and BP staff data, including their ages, social security numbers, tax identification numbers and addresses. Ernst & Young continues to maintain that the laptop poses little risk, as it was password protected.
Jeff Moran, the husband of an IBM worker told of the data breach commented, "Ernst & Young has a policy that this type of information is not supposed to be on a laptop, yet these guys download the data because it's convenient for them."
Password protection would be trivial to bypass, unless the actual data was encrypted.