ARIZONA (UPDATE) SOURCES AT HONEYWELL NOW SAY THAT COMPUTER STOLEN FROM DENVER OFFICE OF AFFILIATED COMPUTER SERVICES CONTAINED HONEYWELL EMPLOYEE DATA Stolen PC puts workers from Honeywell at risk:

Stolen PC puts workers from Honeywell at risk

Max Jarman
The Arizona Republic
Dec. 11, 2006 12:00 AM

For the second time this year, Honeywell employees in the Valley are grappling with a possible leak of their personal information.

An undetermined number of Honeywell workers were notified by the company last week that their names, addresses, Social Security numbers and other personal information were on a computer that was stolen from a Denver office Oct. 14.

The notices include an offer to provide affected employees with fraud protection of up to $25,000 for a year and to monitor credit reports for a similar period.
advertisement


The computer contained the personal information of about 1.4 million people, including employees hired at Honeywell and other companies in the eight months before the theft. Honeywell spokesman Robert Ferris was unable to say how many of the company's employees were affected by the computer theft.

Honeywell's workforce in Arizona is approximately 10,700 employees.

Affiliated Computer Services Inc. of Dallas was maintaining the information for the Colorado Department of Human Services' family support registry. The registry includes the names of people receiving family services in Colorado and a partial list of recent new hires from around the country. Of the 1.4 million names, about 900,000 were new hires.

Companies are required to report information on new employees to the state agencies to aid in the collection of child-support payments. Companies can choose which state to send the information to.

"For some reason, a lot of companies choose Colorado," said Kevin Lightfoot, a spokesman for Affiliated Computer Services. He noted that information at a specific state is accessible by other state agencies.

Lightfoot said the company is working with the FBI, the Denver Police Department and the Colorado Bureau of Investigation to recover the computer and its data.

To date, there is no indication that the information has been used for illicit purposes.

"We believe the target of the theft was the computer and not the information contained on it," Lightfoot said. He added the names and number of companies affected by the theft are not being released.

"We've contacted the companies whose employees were on the computer, and we have tried to also contact the individuals," Lightfoot said.

One Honeywell employee in metropolitan Phoenix, who declined to be identified for this story, first learned his personal information was possibly in the public domain Dec. 8 via a letter from Honeywell's Department of Human Resources.

"My first thought was, 'Am I going to get cleaned out?' " he said.

The employee also wondered why it took the company so long to send out the letter, which was dated Dec. 1.

"My information was out there for six weeks without me knowing about it," he said.

Such information could be used by criminals to make purchases, apply for credit and steal cash and other assets.

Ferris was unable to say why the employees were just now being informed of the theft.

In January, the personal information of 19,000 Honeywell employees was posted on the Internet, reportedly by a disgruntled employee who used a computer to access the data.

A civil suit filed by Honeywell against the reputed perpetrator, Howard Nugent, is pending in the U.S. District Court in Phoenix, according to Ferris.