By Alex Scroxton10 October 2008
Lumension Security and Yosemite Technologies have laid into EDS
after it was revealed today that contractors working on behalf of the government
have managed to lose a hard drive containing personal data on over 100,000 British
service personnel.
The loss was revealed during an audit of EDS’ practices at
its Hook facility that ironically, was being carried out to comply with
regulations brought in after last year’s Home Office fiasco, when the details
of 25 million child benefit claimants were lost.
Andrew Clarke, international senior vice president at
Lumension said that not enough businesses were taking the still growing number
of data losses seriously.
“The government released a report into handling procedures
in June addressing this issue and we are seeing isolated moves to proactive
implementation of policy, but we can only ask when will all organisations start
taking this escalating data loss seriously,” he said.
Yosemite EMEA manager Martin Petts said that human failure
was clearly the biggest weakness in data protection, and called for the
industry to start pushing automatic encryption solutions to help address this.
Earlier in 2008 the MoD revealed that it has had over 600
laptops stolen since 2004.
