This week’s Rip involves a case of eight lost laptops in the UK, from the Royal London Mutual Insurance Society. According to an SC Magazine report, and thanks to Jake K via DataLossDB, 2,135 people were breached when unencrypted laptops were lost by the RLMIS.

This story, however, is replete with the most poignant and well-spoken quotes I have ready in months, possibly years. I simply must quote at length:

Chris McIntosh, CEO of Stonewood, said: “Once again the ICO has pressured an organisation into taking remedial steps to prevent such a data loss happening again, and once again, the details of the case show that organisations simply are not taking the threat of the loss or theft of data seriously enough.

“Too many organisations take an ‘it only happens to other people’ approach, assuming these breaches will not affect them, until they inevitably do. For organisations such as insurance companies, trusted with the sensitive personal data of not just their employees but also a multitude of customers, this is quite frankly unacceptable.

“Royal London seems to have scored a hat trick of errors in this incident: the lack of knowledge of machines’ contents; the lack of insight into laptops’ locations; and the lack of encryption on machines has all combined to make this loss much more serious than it need have been.

“Keeping track of the contents and location of company property should be a simple administrative matter, and effective, tamper-proof encryption on laptops and memory storage is now more than affordable. Organisations need to start paying attention, take more care to protect, track and encrypt their data, and aim to prevent the ICO making any more announcements such as this one.”

Well said. Very well said.