Hardly a day goes by without news of some laptop containing sensitive information about customers or staff getting lost or stolen. The latest high profile example is the Bord Gais burglary in Dublin in which an unencrypted laptop containing the bank details of 75,000 electricity customers was stolen. Hilariously, Bord Gais told the people affected that "data security and laptop encryption is a major priority for us". More practically, it urged the names to watch out for their bank accounts. Bord Gais is not uniquely incompetent in laptop security matters, as this week’s trawl of the Reg Library shows. Even when laptops are supplied encrypted, many employees will switch off encryption, in defiance of company policies. Let’s explore this in a little more detail.
