To put the 10,000 number in perspective, I looked up Home Depot's total number of employees -- apparently 355,000!
No amount of data loss is okay, of course, but this one could have been much worse than it was, as it 'only' included 2.8% of their employees.
The weakest link
If I was one of the 10,000 employees who were just fed to the wolves, I'd be plenty unhappy. Unfortunately, data security is only as good as the weakest link - the end user. If people are allowed to take sensitive information like this outside the network, strong encryption needs to be used and enforced. The laptop had a password - whoopee. That just means they can't login easily, it doesn't mean the data is safe, as anyone with more than a modest amount of IT talent will attest. That data is wide open to whoever stole the laptop if they have even half a clue what they are doing.
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