A recent survey of London taxi drivers shows that December is the worst time of year for losing mobile phones, laptops and memory sticks.

Apparently some 10,000 mobiles are left behind in taxis every month, and over 1,000 laptops, flash drives and other removable devices too. It’s believed that most of these losses happen because they slip out of peoples’ pockets, or are simply forgotten as passengers rush to their next meeting or destination.

The good news is that London cabbies are more honest than their counterparts in New York:
80% of taxi drivers in London claimed that they had reunited owners with their devices once they were found, compared to just 66% in New York.

Even so, it’s all the more reason to secure any data on these portable devices with encryption – just in case you’re one of the 20% whose device isn’t found.

As you may have seen in the news, there’s a widespread email phishing scam going on that has so far affected over 30,000 users of Hotmail, Google and Yahoo’s web mail services.  Username and password details for these accounts were posted briefly online. 

But there’s also an underlying security issue that needs attention.  Many people often use one password for multiple online applications, such as their webmail, online banking and more.  Which means if a hacker can crack one password, they may have access to many other aspects of your online life.

So it’s worth having a different, and complex, password for every online application that you want to protect.  This is easy to do with our Usecure USB flash drives, as the user interface requires that you use a complex alphanumeric password (it also gives you a handy reminder, just in case you should forget).  But it’s good practice to not use that password again!

Missing or stolen USB flash drives have had a great deal of attention over the past two years.  But bigger drives can go astray too, and when they do, it can mean a truly massive data loss.

It was announced yesterday that a hard drive has been reported missing from the US National Archives, containing over 1 terabyte of sensitive data from the time of President Clinton’s administration.  Data includes the personal information of White House staff and visitors, logs of events, social gatherings, political records and more.

The drive was apparently stored in an unsecured work area, where National Archives employees were digitising information from the Clinton administration.  It’s estimated that over 100 staff had access to the area during the time period when the loss happened.  The FBI is now conducting a criminal investigation.

Mandatory hardware encryption – like that featured on our Cruzer Enterprise range of secure USB flash drives would have nullified the threat of such a loss.  As the old saying goes, the bigger they are, they harder they fall.  That applies to drive storage, too.