Teknovis

There seem to be a lot of laptops being stolen this week in Ireland! See Inquiry after HSE laptops are stolen and Bord Gáis customer details on stolen laptops for details and video reports. The greatest concern in both of these cases is the sensitive data that might now be used maliciously. Hopefully, they were all stolen for the value of the hardware, and nothing more will come of this!

However, it does make me wonder how many more incidents like this will need to happen before companies decide to encrypt all data on all laptops! Apparently, I am not the only person wondering this! The main opposition political party in Ireland now wants to make encryption mandatory according to Mandatory encryption for laptops needed. In practice I do not think that this is very practical. For example, how strong must the encryption be? How must the keys be stored? Will the legislation try to cover these details?

Politicians trying to legislate technology :|

I also wonder if all of this data really needs to be stored locally on laptops!

I do not have any sensitive data on my laptop, and hence I do not use any encryption software. However, I have heard good things about TrueCrypt. It is open source, and available for all major operating systems.

Tags: Encryption, Ireland, TrueCrypt

RTE are reporting that Bank of Ireland has lost a memory stick that contains personal details of almost 900 customers. The full article is Bank of Ireland customer details lost.

This is just the latest incident of Bank of Ireland losing customer details! However, in this case the bank is claiming that the storage of customer details without encryption on a memory stick is a breach of its policies and procedures.

Perhaps Bank of Ireland needs to examine why employees are able to copy sensitive customer details to any memory sticks!

Tags: Bank of Ireland, Encryption, Memory Stick, RTE