ICO tells Marks and Sparks to crack down on encryption

The Information Commissioners Office has ruled that Marks and Spencer must ensure it has appropriate encryption measures in place by April 2008.

The ruling follows last years little mishap in the case of the stolen laptop.

Marks and Spencer had the information of 26,000 employees on a laptop and as those unencrypted laptops tend to be, it was stolen.

The laptop was in the home of and M&S contractor when it went missing. It is said to have contained the pension details of over 25,000 employees. The contractor was thought to have been employed to print letters to employees regarding their pension plans.

Really, we can’t see why it’s so difficult to keep laptops with delicate or valuable information in a safe. If they insist on not encrypting them, they could at least put them under lock and key. Quite clearly some of the more popular places (such as someone’s home or the back seat of their car) aren’t as effective.

It’s only January and we’ve already seen one junior Naval officer slip up by misplacing a laptop that contained the private details of over 600,000 applicants to the armed forces.

The laptop was stolen while the young man was in Birmingham. It was taken from the backseat of his car, in the middle of the night. Clever boy. Read more here.