Laptop containing confidential data bought from eBay
Friday, February 29th, 2008Another missing disc case from the Government, this time from our friends at the Home Office.
An IT repair firm in Lancashire was repairing a computer for a customer, who said they bought it on eBay, and discovered an optical disc marked “Home Office” and “Confidential” in the machine. It had been hidden under the keyboard.
The good news, in this case, is that the data on the disc appears to have been encrypted and the disc has been returned. The Home Office has said that the laptop was encrypted too, which suggests it was an official machine but makes us wonder what it was doing on eBay.
The Home Office hasn’t revealed what sort of data was on the disc, but, as The Register wryly suggests, “all the data may have already been lost in other massive governmant data blunders of recent times.”
