Posted by SecExtra on February 28th, 2008

Counter terrorism police are today investigating the discovery of a Home Office laptop and encrypted data disc - apparently bought on eBay. The confidential disc was discovered when the laptop was brought in for servicing. We have a great viewpoint from Brian Spector, an IT content protection expert.

“With the statistics showing that nearly 500 government devices have gone missing since 2001, it was only a matter of time before a confidential disc inadvertently ended up on Ebay. Luckily, the public sector finally seems to be learning from repeated mistakes, as the laptop and disc were encrypted. Unfortunately accidents like this are not going to stop happening so we can only hope that other government departments follow the Home Office’s lead and adopt full disc encryption. Technology that will easily safeguard such confidential data is readily available - the British public needs to know that the government is using it to ensure that all the information it holds on its citizens is secure and properly protected.” - Brian Spector, General Manager for Content Protection Group, Workshare

With the encryption easier to crack these days (see this post), are you worried about your data showing up in some odd place like ebay for all to see?