Only seven out of ten Ministry of Defence laptops are fully encrypted, according to the department's annual accounts report for 2009-2010, which paint a grim picture of information mismanagement within the armed forces' infrastructure.
The MOD has improved its laptop loss rate, from 326 machines in 2008-09 to 121 notebooks in 2009-10, but at that rate some 40 laptops may have gone missing with no protection for the potentially critical information stored within them.
The MOD has focused on data management following the Data Handling Review and Sir Edmund Burton's 2008 into the loss of MOD data, and “has undertaken considerable further work to prohibit the use of unencrypted media, and to improve personal data handling generally,” the report said.