St Albans Council loses fourth laptop this month
A laptop has been stolen from St Albans District Council containing the personal details of over 14,000 local postal voters. The details included the names, addresses, dates of birth and signatures of 14,673 residents – everyone who applied for a postal votes for the June local election.
The laptop was the fourth to be stolen from the council this month.
The council has reassured the St Albans Review that the laptop did not contain details of votes cast and was protected by two levels of security.
However commentators have pointed out that if the two levels of security are not strong enough the personal data could be used for bank or credit card fraud.
Chris McIntosh, chief executive of hardware encryption specialist Stonewood, said the data should have been encrypted and two layers of password protections is not an answer that will put residents' minds at rest.
"We don't know what these two layers are, and if they're just simple log-in passwords then it is quite simply not good enough as they can be easily hacked," he said.
"Organisations must start to understand the value of data and treat it accordingly. In cases like this where we are talking about personal data it must be encrypted to ensure that if a device is stolen the data can't be accessed," McIntosh added.
Meanwhile data security firm CheckPoint said the incident shows organisations are still overlooking the lessons of the past two years.
"In our recent survey of 135 public and private sector firms, over 50 per cent did not have any encryption in place to secure data on their laptops. This hasn't changed since the HMRC incident, so you have to wonder how many incidents it will take for the lessons to sink in," said Check Point Northern Europe regional director Nick Lowe.
Reproduced from an article published by v3.co.uk
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