September 18, 2008

London cabs attracted 60,000 mobile devices in 6 months

New data has revealed that in the last 6 months over 60,000 mobile devices have been left in the back of London cabs. In total 55,843 mobile phones and 6,193 other devices, such as laptops, were forgotten. Most of these containing key data useful to thieves.

This is coming hot on the heels of the news that a computer hard drive holding details of up to 5,000 justice system
employees had been lost last year and in August a private consulting
firm lost a memory stick containing the details of tens of thousands of
prisoners. In addition, in November last year, HM Revenue and Customs lost two
computer discs containing the entire child benefit records, including
the personal details of 25 million people.

A survey by credit reference agency Equifax in April suggested 16% of
its customers put PIN numbers on their mobile devices while 24%
recorded birthday dates. This alone opens up the possibility of large scale identity theft if criminals should gani access to this information

The morale of the story is actually 3 fold:

1) Look after your personal devices
2) Don't take confidential information on personal devices unless absolutely necessary
3) Encrypt and password protect all personal devices


1 comment:

  1. You missed one:

    4) Don't take Top Secret information with you if you're going to get drunk.

    ReplyDelete