230 retailers affected by data breach after tape lost

Data breach story of the week..."The missing backup tape was unencrypted."..enough said?...GE Money could be used to finance other small business items such as a large software purchase too...thus far it states only retailers and hopefully it's limited to one identifiable group..BD

January 20, 2008 (IDG News Service) -- A backup tape containing credit card information from hundreds of U.S. retailers is missing, forcing the company responsible for the data to warn customers that they may become the targets of data fraud.
GE Money USA, which manages in-store credit programs for many U.S. retailers, first realized that the tape was missing from an Iron Mountain Inc. storage facility in October, said Richard Jones, a company spokesman. "We were informed that one of the tapes could not be located. But at the same time, there was no record of it ever having been checked out," he said.
The tape contained in-store credit card information on 650,000 retail customers, including those of J.C. Penney Co., he said. GE Money employees were also affected by the breach. Although J.C. Penney was the only company that Jones would confirm as affected by the missing tape, that retailer accounts for just a small percentage of all accounts that were compromised. In total, 230 retailers are affected by the breach. "Clearly, that number includes many of the national retail organizations," he said.