This dramatic headline on the front page of today's Daily Mail heads a story about the personal details of more than 1 million bank customers being found on a secondhand computer.
That article also mentions the recent loss, by the Home office, of records on 127000 criminals—apparently, more than 3200 Government laptops and mobile phones have been lost or stolen since 2001.
As it happens, this blog has carried a couple of recent articles directly relevant to this very issue.
The fact is that many people inadvertently give away valuable personal information when disposing of old computers and, while there is little direct value in a second-hand PC, there is a ready market for the information that it might contain.
It can be quite tricky to clean-out sensitive information while preserving existing software and simply deleting files, even if you can find them all, is not the complete answer.
Where there is a serious security risk, it would be safer to wipe the entire hard disk (by writing over existing data) or even to physically destroy it.
After so many incidents of lost Government lap-tops, it is astonishing that these are still being carried around without the secure encryption of all data—indeed, it is surprising that bulk data is being carried around or sent through the post at all when the most up-to-date version could be securely accessed online.
See Also:
Raising the Dead—www.eurofilesupport.com/2008/07/raising-the-dea.html
Cleaning-up your PC—www.eurofilesupport.com/2008/08/cleaning-up-you.html
Comments