Highways England, the community entire body dependable for retaining motorways and big roadways in England, has misplaced 125 electronic gadgets about the very last five many years.
The revelation follows a Independence of Info Act (FOI) ask for and has prompted warnings to be issued by info backup (opens in new tab) and protection analysts (opens in new tab) alike about lax cybersecurity procedures (opens in new tab).
Adhering to close inspection of official figures by Griffin Regulation, the agency was observed to have misplaced more than 1 hundred vital units, which provided tricky drives, laptops and iron critical storage units. All could have possibly contained confidential facts.
Crunching the figures, analysts discovered that the figures bundled eight laptops that had been misplaced or stolen. On top rated of that, a desktop computer system, 69 mobile telephones, 12 tablets, 5 iron crucial storage units and four difficult drives had also disappeared about the 5 yr period of time.
Misplaced mobile telephones ended up the primary product of components to go lacking, with 17 misplaced in 2021 by itself and one more five currently being documented as stolen. On the other hand, 2018 was the largest calendar year for machine decline, with 20 phones and 8 laptops misplaced. A even more 6 other gadgets have been missing, ensuing in a whole of 34 lacking gadgets.
Linked: Greatest antivirus program (opens in new tab).
Higher protection measures wanted
Achi Lewis, Place Vice President EMEA, Complete Program (opens in new tab), commented: “Now we are dwelling in a mostly hybrid doing the job natural environment, running and keeping keep track of of a workforce and their equipment has develop into additional complicated than ever.
Now fairly than having all an organisation’s products in one position, they are scattered about, increasing the assault floor for organisations, this sort of as Highways England, and therefore necessitating bigger safety actions.
A resilient zero have faith in plan ought to be deployed to prevent malicious actors from breaching a lost or stolen product, or endpoint.
This can be combined with answers this sort of as safe entry controls, permitting the organisation to remotely shut off a misplaced product, shielding both equally the knowledge on the product by itself and the rest of the network, and stopping further more high priced information decline.”
How to locate the most effective VPN company (opens in new tab).