Americans generally do the right thing, after first exhausting all the available alternatives - Winston Spencer Churchill
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Navy details go overboard
THE ROYAL NAVY is investigating the case of an unsecured USB drive containing restricted information including details of personnel and some naval operations.
According to the Guardian, the drive was found in the Odyssey car park not far from the Belfast docks. Working on the age old 'finders keepers' principle, the enterprising person who found the drive attempted to sell it to a newspaper. After being turned down, they handed the device in to the local police.
Two Royal Navy investigators have flown from Portsmouth to investigate to incident and will focus their efforts on the warship the HMS Hurworth, which is currently out at sea but was moored in Belfast Lough not far from the park when the drive was lost.
It is thought that the USB drive contained information on naval manoeuvres around the UK and well as around 37 pages with personnel details such as names, ages and ranks.
At this stage it does not appear that the data was sold on to anyone else, but no proof seems to be available either way.
Jason Holloway, head of sales for Europe at flash storage maker SanDisk, highlighted the obvious flaw in the whole debacle.
"Although the memory stick was found and handed in, it's unknown if the restricted data on the device was copied. It's likely that the data was accessible, as it was offered for sale to a newspaper before the stick was returned," he said.
Holloway reckons that companies are now starting to ban the use of personal USB devices, and should opt for only authorised drives that use hardware-encryption to ensure that sensitive material is not compromised if the drive goes missing. µ
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Jason;
Another way to look at it is that,SCUM ALWAYS RISES TO THE TOP!
here here. i agree totally. Whichever little kid on that boat who lost that drive should be shot. in fact, the captain of that boat should probably be shot also for letting the little tyke sneak off the boat in the first place. we can't trust these children fighting wars with any confidential information.
but is there something about British government that lowers everyone's collective IQ?
Seems like there might be a correlation between having a government job and being an idiot.
People lose them. They don't lose themselves. People need to be held accountable for things they hold in trust. People need to have adequate reasons to put the information on a flash drive in the first place.
It's about people failing in their duties and obligations, not about drives going missing.