Over 600,000 laptops are reported lost or stolen every year at US airports according to a ComputerWorld story. The story, based on a survey by the Ponemon Institute says that 65% of them are never recovered. Laptops are most often lost at security checkpoints. Hotels and taxi cabs are also prime locations for losing laptops and cell phones.
Close to 10,278 laptops are reported lost every week at 36 of the largest U.S. airports, and 65% of those laptops are not reclaimed, the survey said. Around 2,000 laptops are recorded lost at the medium-size airports, and 69% are not reclaimed. The institute conducted field surveys at 106 airports in 46 states and surveyed 864 business travelers.
Millions of dollars are spent each year on sophisticated information security products. Simple things like stolen laptops and lost memory sticks / thumb drives are a major security vulnerability.
The Washington Post reports that data breaches are up 69% this year.
The Identity Theft Resource Center in San Diego tracked 342 data breach reports from Jan. 1 to June 27. More than one-third of the reports came from businesses, a 27 percent increase over business breaches for all of 2007.
The center found that data breaches among health-care providers and banks also increased. They now account for 15 percent and 10 percent of the breaches, respectively. Breaches from educational institutions, government entities and the military declined for the third year in a row, the center found.
Hacking was the least-cited cause of data breaches in the first six months of this year. Instead, lost or stolen laptops and other digital storage media remain the most frequently cited cause of data breaches, accounting for more than 20 percent of all reported cases, the center found. The inadvertent posting of personal and financial data online prompted roughly 15 percent.
The Industry Standard reports that losing cell phones is even more common. And, the newer Smart Phones contain contact lists, pictures, documents, confidential emails, links to sensitive information, etc.
I didn't mean for this to be an alarming post about information security breaches. I just did a simple web search and these were the top three links in the search results. It looks like there is a lot of work yet to be done in the Information Security area.
