Another NHS Trust loses data
Great Yarmouth & Waveney Primary Care Trust has suffered a data breach according to the Information Commissioner’s Office. The PCT reported the theft of two desktop computers to the ICO resulting in the loss of data records of some 1000 occupational therapy patients and staff members. Apparently there was no alarm system, no internal door locks and crucially no encryption of the data. Commenting on the breach, James Hall of IronKey EMEA reseller of the year Complete Source, said “often desktops are forgotten when it comes to encryption. This can be because they are in general not seen as portable and software encryption can cause a performance overhead headache”. He added “if desktops can not be physically secured within an organisation and enforcing network storage instead of local storage is not an option, then the strategic move is to have internal hard disks in the desktops that are hardware encryptable. This removes the overhead and imaging time issues and introduces a strong encryption through hardware than can be achieved with software alone”