Time Warner Employee Data Lost

Time Warner Inc. on Monday said data on 600,000 current and former employees stored on computer backup tapes was lost by an outside storage company and that the U.S. Secret Service is investigating the incident.

Time Warner’s data storage company, Boston-based Iron Mountain Inc., lost the tapes during transport to a storage facility, Time Warner said.

The world’s largest media company, which owns America Online, HBO and Warner Bros. studio, said the missing tapes contained data from Time Warner, including names and Social Security information on the employees. The tapes did not include personal data on Time Warner customers, it said.

A Time Warner spokeswoman said the data tapes included information dating back to 1986 on 600,000 employees, among them about 85,000 current employees.

“While we have no evidence to suggest the information on the tapes has been accessed or misused, we are providing current and former employees with resources to monitor their credit reports while our investigation continues,” said Larry Cockell, Time Warner’s chief security officer.

Time Warner’s disclosure follows a string of other high-profile security breaches in the U.S.

In February, Bank of America Corp. said it had alerted federal investigators that computer backup tapes containing credit card records of U.S. senators and more than 1 million federal government employees were lost.

That same month, ChoicePoint Inc., which provides identity verification services, said identity thieves gained access to a customer database of 145,000 profiles including Social Security numbers and credit reports.

Also, data broker LexisNexis, a division of Anglo-Dutch Reed Elsevier, reported in April that identity thieves had gained access to 310,000 U.S. account holders’ Social Security numbers, names, addresses and driver’s license numbers in 59 break-in attempts over two years.