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Feb 26, 2009 | 5
It seems everyday a story makes the news about a stolen laptop containing loads of valuable information. Today, for example, a thief absconded with seven Dell laptops from the Maidstone Borough electoral registration office in Kent, U.K. (Fortunately, officials reported that there was no sensitive info stored on the stolen computers.) Teachers in Steamboat Springs, Colo., were not as lucky. A burglar (or burglars) earlier this week lifted a laptop from the Steamboat Springs School District office containing 10 years worth of Social Security numbers for 1,300 past and present employees, the Steamboat Pilot & Today reports.
Nov 20, 2008 | 6
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Attention, shoppers: If the cart you selected has a handle greased with Vaseline, you may be an unwitting participant in an undercover experiment.
Ditto if you find an envelope stuffed with cash hanging out of a mailbox.
More than 600 people unknowingly took part in a series of "field experiments" in Groningen in the Netherlands designed to test the "broken window" theory, which posits that bad behavior begets bad behavior. That is: if someone sees, say, graffiti scrawled on a building, he or she will be tempted to do the same or commit some other illegal or mischievous act.
Nov 11, 2008 | 5
Think you deleted that sensitive data before selling your PC? Think again.
More than half of people who toss computers in the garbage or sell them are leaving sensitive data on their hard drives, making it possible that a snoop could steal their identities, according to a paper to be published early next year in the International Journal of Liability and Scientific Enquiry.
Despite the increasing use of personal computers, fewer people are effectively wiping the memory of their discarded PCs, according to the report, written by Andrew Jones, British Telecommunications's head of information security research, and Glenn Dardick of Longwood University, in Farmville, Va. Jones, Dardick and researchers from Edith Cowan University in western Australia and the U.K.'s University of Glamorgan found that only 33 percent of the disks they tested in 2007 had been properly wiped clean of sensitive data, compared with 45 percent in 2006. The researchers plan to have 2008 statistics ready by the end of the year.
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