Perhaps the most striking fact about a recent revelation by the British Ministry of Defense that hundreds of laptop computers, flash drives and memory sticks—some containing secret information—were stolen between 2004 and 2007 is the realization that the news is not surprising at all, in the view of many IT security experts.
In fact, removable media theft such as this has become commonplace and now outstrip viruses and malware as the leading computer security threats, in the eyes of IT managers, one report showed. And just a short list of recent breaches seems to bear out that claim. In one recent incident, the personal information about 23 students at a Kansas college may have been compromised when a laptop was stolen from an auditor’s parked car. Yet another institution faced the same problem, but this time affecting 15,000 people, when a flash drive was stolen from a contractor as he was vacationing at a resort. Even more frightening, perhaps, was the theft of another government computer in Great Britain when an official left it on a train—in that case, it contained counter-terrorism files. And in an embarrassment for the U.S. government that echoed the British data theft in at least one sense, a soldier in Iraq lost a flash drive that contained personal videos. When the videos fell into enemy hands, they were edited into falsified propaganda and aired on television.
Back in the U.K., the Defense Ministry, for one, is taking such advice seriously after completing what turned out to be an embarrassing and politically-charged tally for often critical Members of Parliament. During the four-year period, they were forced to admit, 658 laptops were stolen and another 89 units were lost. Of those, just 32 were ever recovered.
This is the latest in a series of data loss incidents:
- November 2007 – Revenue and Customs officials lost the personal details of 25 million people
- June 2008 – A computer was stolen from the office of Communities Secretary Hazel Blears and files on counter-terrorism were left on a train
- January 2008 – The MoD revealed that one of its laptops – containing the details of 600,000 people – was stolen from a car
In each case, security experts say, the lost information should have been safeguarded to ensure that even if the devices were stolen the data could not be. While encryption has historically been complex and costly, we’re proud that SensiGuard has turned securing information into an affordable one-click function for any computer user.
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