British Ministry of Defence struggling to combat disappearing data

The BBC has reported that the British Ministry of Defence is still struggling to contain losses of USB sticks and laptops holding critical data. As recommended by the Burton Report, around 20,000 military laptops are now fitted with data-encryption systems. But it has now turned out that more laptops have disappeared than was previously known.

Advertisement

The Ministry of Defence says half of all its laptops use encryption software to protect data in case they go missing, and that 2,000 laptops that could not be fitted with such software were taken out of service. It announced at the same time that 747 laptops had been lost or stolen. Previously, the number of laptops that disappeared between 2004 and 2007 had been given as 347. Questioned by the BBC, the Ministry admitted that 121 USB sticks had also disappeared during the same period. Apparently, three of these memory sticks contained secret information, while 19 held restricted information.

Serious alarm was raised by a report in the Sunday Times that a high-ranking member of Prime Minister Gordon Brown's staff had lost his Blackberry, containing confidential data, in Shanghai, China, after spending a night with a woman now presumed to have been a Chinese agent. The newspaper concludes that he was a victim of a special honeypot operation.

(Detlef Borchers)

(trk)