A team of auditors from Ernst and Young met Feb. 9 at Beacon Pointe at Weston, FL. At noon, they left for lunch, leaving their laptop computers just inside the front door of a conference room. The door-locking mechanism had a built-in delay that allowed two men to enter the office a minute later without a security swipe and walked off with four Dell laptops, according to security footage.
A surveillance video showed the last employee left the room at 12:47 p.m. The video showed the thieves entered the main office at 12:48 and were out of sight in the conference room. They were in the room less than a minute before the tape showed them leaving.
On the video, the backpack of one thief appeared to be full as they exited into the main hall and out of the camera's range.
It's unclear what type of security Ernst and Young had on the four laptops pinched in Weston.
This theft follows a higher-profile incident in which an Ernst and Young employee lost his laptop containing the social security numbers and other personal information of customers.
One such customer happened to be Sun Microsystems CEO Scott McNealy who was told that his social security number had been compromised.
The laptop with McNealy's data was stolen from an employee's car, according to Ernst and Young. The accounting giant maintains that the laptop containing McNealy's information was password protected.
Ernst and Young has failed to issue a public statement about these breaches despite being a major advocate of transparency in such issues in its role as an auditor and corporate advisor.
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