Stolen Ameriprise laptop had data on 230,000 people

The security breach occurred in late December after a company laptop was stolen from an employee's car.

Feb. 2, 2006 12:00 p.m. PT

2 min read

Ameriprise Financial, the investment advisory unit spun off from American Express last year, said Wednesday that lists containing the personal information of about 230,000 customers and advisers had been compromised.

A security breach occurred in late December, Ameriprise said, after a company laptop was stolen from an employee's parked car. The laptop contained a list of reassigned customer accounts that was being stored unencrypted, a violation of Ameriprise's rules.

The information on the laptop included the names and Social Security numbers of about 70,000 current and former financial advisers and the names and internal account numbers of about 158,000 customers, about 6 percent of its 2.8 million clients.



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An Ameriprise spokesman, Andrew MacMillan, said it was unlikely that the thief knew that the information was on the laptop and the risk of "any data being used or discovered is very low."

MacMillan said that the laptop was protected by a password but that the data was being stored unencrypted in violation of company rules. The employee involved has been fired.

"This information should not have been removed from the corporate office without the security measures in place," he said. "This individual violated a few written company policies."

The company said it had started notifying the customers and the advisers on Saturday.

Ameriprise, which reports its earnings Thursday, is the latest company to acknowledge a security breach in a wave of incidents that have rocked the financial services industry. Some have occurred when cyberthieves broke into unprotected computer networks, like one at CardSystems Solutions, a tiny credit card processing company that left the personal account information of 40 million consumers exposed to fraud. Others, like those at Bank of America and Citigroup, have occurred when data tapes were lost.