Cheap laptops for sale - 43 in stock

Mostly fell off the back of a UK Home Office lorry.
Oh, and 94 mobile phones too. First come first served!!

Home Office losing laptops & phones go missing

Seriously though, this sort of loss is worrying. Our private information seems to be spilling out all over the shop. Next they will be giving the stuff away in cornflake boxes

Question
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How many people here have fallen foul of identity theft?

Me raises hand. I received a few bills for mobile phone contracts, and attempts made by fraudsters to open up bank accounts in my name. I had to register with CIFAS just to keep the lid on things. Despite the fact that I am careful not to discard papers with my details on, or give away my personal details anywhere (forums etc..)
Somehow, these fraudsters can get still obtain any information they need. Makes you wonder if something 'fishy' is going on

I think you have to take scale into account here. Yes the MOD may have lost over 50 laptops, but there are possibly over a hundred thousand people employed by the MOD, so that's really not that bad. It's like saying the Boots the chemist had £15,000,000 goods shoplifted last year, where as you local phamacy lost £100, speaking in terms of scale, your local phamacy would still be less secure.

Here comes all that IRS data.

Unfortunately, it's not just The Home Office:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/7581540.stm

@Andy

Watching your tutorials actually convinced me to go for Blitz instead of Dark, thanx for that. Now i'll just wait for you to switch to BlitzMax :)
Keep up the good work!

On topic:
Last year 1 usb-stick and 1 laptop got stolen containing sensitive government material. That was a really big deal then in the Netherlands. If 43 laptop were to be stolen containing government information the minister of that department would probably have to resign.

I also saw a recent article about old computers simply being discarded, but with the hard drives still holding confidential information. That's a bonehead mistake.

I reckon its a farce. I wouldnt be surprised if an organised group (be they terrorists, criminals, political extremists) have infiltrated the government, HMAF and the police at various levels and are selling this stuff off. Then they set up some minor somebody to "loose" the data so everyone has someone to "blame" (and know the government will whitewash it as much as they can). Then when the information is found in the "enemys" hands its harder to find out who the 'mole' is or weather there even is a mole at all. All they know a laptop was officially 'lost' and some random Joe could have found it and posted it on some internet conspiracy site for all to see.

All public service departments and companys handling sensitive info should:

A) use encrypted remote desktop access only for working with sensitive files. Its quite possible these days. Its fast and secure enough when using X forwarding or VMware etc. No data like this should be stored locally anymore.
b) stop using such standard and easily breachable systems like windows. Gary McKinnon actually said that he was much more able to hack those US defence computers simply because they were windows based.
c)If data must be stored locally or on removable media then it should use a full filesystem encryption with no 'authority backdoors' just one key for the user and one for mission critical IT.
d)If data needs to be sent somewhere then it must be done over a private encrypted stream, NEVER in the mail.
e)When PCs are 'disposed' the harddisks should be either wiped to DOD5220M standard or melted down.

Especially PS and defense, after all its ALL our loss, not just theirs. Its a disgrace.

Fully agree

I just cannnot trust these departments. It's as if "Cash for questions" is now becoming "Cash for data"