Three laptops, one of which contains the names,
addresses and dates of birth of 11,000 children in Nottinghamshire
have gone missing fromNottinghamshire County Teaching Primary Care
Trust.
The computers went missing on 21 March. The trust, which was
only set up last October, says it has written to all parents of the
children involved, warning them of the theft.
The laptop is said to have been password protected, but the
information is not thought to have been encrypted.
Trust chief executive Wendy Saviour said, “When we discovered
the theft, we immediately took steps to determine the nature of the
information held on these computers.”
She said one of the computers contained names, addresses and
dates of birth of local children, aged between eight months and
eight years. The children are from the Newark & Sherwood,
Ashfield and Mansfield areas of the county.
Saviour said, “We are working closely with the police to
investigate this theft and to recover the stolen computers.
“There was no health information or other details on the laptop.
The information was protected by a password, which reduces the
chances of anyone being able to see the information. We have
however this week, written to all the 9,742 families affected by
this theft to inform them of what has happened.”
Saviour added that “action will be taken to ensure that lessons
are learned”.
Jamie Cowper from data encryption expert
PGP, said, “Once
again, a laptop containing sensitive information has been stolen
from inside a trusted public institution. The fact that this time
the information in question relates to young children is a stark
illustration that it is not just fraud and identity theft we need
to worry about in cases like these.”
He said, “Passwords aren't enough - to achieve absolute
information security, organisations have to deploy comprehensive
encryption policies across all devices.”
The UK information commissioner recently threatened a number of
banks, the immigration service and Royal Mail with fines, if they
failed to tighten up their data security after customer details
were found dumped outside their buildings.
Related article:
High price of failing to tighten data
security.
Related article:
Police force secures data with biometrics
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