£500,000 Dry Cleaning Bill and Potential Imprisonment
Hallelujah! At last the Information Commissioner is showing some teeth with the recent announcement that from 6th April 2010 companies who lose information that ends up being breached because they didn’t’ adequately protect it could end up being fined by up to £500,000 and possibly face imprisonment!!
As most of the breaches that occurred in 2009 were mainly Government screw ups – it’ll be interesting to see who’ll be publicly hung out to dry first – my guess is it’ll be a government body – now won’t that be an interesting dilemma as the government works their way towards an election. On the subject of being caught with your pants down and having to have them cleaned – we’ve just issued our second laundrette and mobile security survey for Credant technologies to find out how many memory sticks are left in laundrettes. It’s a survey to illustrate how easy it is to lose information in even the most unlikely places. Unbelievably the number has halved from over 9000 to 4,500 compared with the same period last year – well we thought this was a bit strange especially as we’ve been doing these sorts of survey’s for 15 years and know that most users don’t give a stuffing about security so why have they dropped in number. In delving a bit deeper and talking with Credant’s “consultants at the coalface” they say it comes down to memory sticks which are just no longer the flavour of the month. It would appear that people are downloading data onto their smartphones and blackberry’s – or onto their funky little netbooks which are a whole lot heavier and therefore a bit more obvious when handing them across the laundrette counter. Are netbooks and smartphones going to mean the demise of the memory stick? With the latest Information Commissioners Office announcement I think companies are going to be a whole lot stricter with what they allow their users to download onto their mobile devices as they sure as hell won’t want their dirty laundry hung out to dry in public! This can only smell fresh news for all of us in the IT security industry – roll on 6th April!