THERE WAS no evidence to suggest that the information contained in the stolen Department of Social and Family Affairs' laptop was used, Taoiseach Brian Cowen said.
Mr Cowen said Minister for Social and Family Affairs Mary Hanafin had provided a full and frank disclosure upon being notified of what had happened so that the people concerned could take whatever precautions they wished to ensure their personal information would not be used by anybody in an unauthorised way.
"It is regrettable that the theft happened, but I am sure whatever lessons are to be learned in terms of encryption arrangements will be learned," he added.
Ms Hanafin, in a written Dáil reply, confirmed that the missing files contained some 380,000 individual personal customer records.
The information, she said, had been provided by the department to the office of the Comptroller & Auditor General (C&AG) on foot of authorised requests in line with established protocols.
"These officials were provided with access to the file on the department's internal ICT network where the data was stored in an encoded format," she said.
"They subsequently transferred the data to the laptop in question.
"While the laptop was password-protected, the data was not encrypted." Ms Hanafin said the department had been engaged in a programme of continuous development and deployment of measures to enhance data security.
Since the incident came to light, the department had further reviewed and enhanced its protocols relating to the transfer of data to third parties, including the office of the C&AG, she added.
All bulk data was now transferred in an encrypted format, in accordance with the department's external party electronic data transfer policy, she said.
