Thanks for the memory sticks

With apologies to Bob Hope..

# Thanks for the memory sticks,
The secrets that we stole,
Suggest you’ve lost control,
Of staff who are lax with laptops, and the rules you extol…
We thank you so much #

One of the hot political news stories in the UK this weekend, is that the British government has revealed that 747 laptops have been lost or stolen from the Ministry of Defence in the last 4 years, 400 more than originally reported. Defence Secretary Des Browne was forced to issue the revised figures after “anomalies in the reporting process” were discovered.

In addition, 121 of the MoD’s USB thumb drives have been taken or misplaced since 2004, 26 of which disappeared since January this year, including three that contained information classified as secret and 19 that were categorised as restricted.

One has to wonder how carefully controlled the use of USB memory sticks is within sensitive government departments. These devices are so small, so convenient, and have so much…

Read more in my article on the Naked Security website.

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Graham Cluley is a veteran of the cybersecurity industry, having worked for a number of security companies since the early 1990s when he wrote the first ever version of Dr Solomon's Anti-Virus Toolkit for Windows. Now an independent analyst, he regularly makes media appearances and is an international public speaker on the topic of cybersecurity, hackers, and online privacy. Follow him on Twitter, Mastodon, Bluesky, or drop him an email.