The UK Ministry of Defense (MoD) has come clean and admitted to the loss of a staggering 658 laptops and 121 USB flash drives since 2004. Only 32 of these laptops were recovered. This revelation came only after a parliamentary question was tabled, and the final figures are at odds with earlier indications from the MoD. There was no additional information available as to whether the lost laptops and flash drives were encrypted, though the likelihood is that the majority of them were not. Clearly, the issue of lost laptops and flash drives will be one to dog corporations and even governments for some time yet. To make matters worse, the recent development of "cold boot" attacks threatens to render disk encryption less robust than it once was thought to be.

For more information on this story:
- check out the iTnews Australia article