The Royal Navy defends against identity theft!
The personal details of 600,000 people who had expressed an interest in joining the armed forces have gone missing after a laptop belonging to a Royal Navy officer was stolen, the Ministry of Defence said last night.
In another breach of government security, police are investigating the theft of the laptop, which was stolen from a vehicle in the Edgbaston area of Birmingham this month and contained, among other information, passport, and national insurance numbers and bank details.
According to defence officials, the MoD has known about the theft since it occurred on January 9. Des Browne, the defence secretary, is expected to appear before MPs next week to explain the theft and why he has not revealed what happened until now.
Uh, no mention in the article about encrypted anything.
Leave it to the governments of the world to doom us all.
DOOOOOOOOOOOOM
#1 – Jake
It usually is, isn’t it? 😉
I wonder how those potential recruits feel now about joining such a rinky-dink outfit?
When will idiots learn that you don’t leave a laptop in your car, especially if there’s sensitive information in it.
A lot of laptops are stolen. Why aren’t manufacturers building them with hardwired encryption?
I’ve lost track of how many times this story has happened — a laptop with sensitive personal information has been stolen.
It happened to my credit card information when the data from Hotels.com was stolen from a laptop owned by their accounting firm Ernst & Young.
The real p!isser is that Ernst and Young touts themselves as security experts on their own website!
I wish some greedy lawyers would start launching multi-gazillion dollar class action lawsuits against these goofballs who leave laptops with our sensitive private data in their cars when they getting a beer.
Crimmny, the least these firms could do is install a TrueCrypt drive.
Do you think they’re smart enough to use it? It’s so difficult to learn.