An article relating to this blog post on Finextra:
Bank of Ireland reports customer data theft
Bank of Ireland (BoI) has admitted that four laptops containing the unencrypted personal details of 10,000 customers have been stolen.
See article
I get a the feeling that the government is more than a little miffed that their own data leak severely wounded their ID card proposal and that someone is going to pay. I suppose it distracts from the inconvenient truth that the details of 25 million citizens
were lost by government, and they can't fine themselves after all.
Of course I do not condone data leaks and strongly advocate less risky systems. Laptops belong in safes if they have client personal data on them. Remote access limitations appear to have led to a culture of carrying everything on laptops. There needs to
be more focus on secure remote access using out of band authentication and strongly encrypted sessions. The risk is far less than when staff carry vast customer details around just in case.
I suggest a rethink on laptop use, with more emphasis on thin client applications for external access to sensitive data, so long as you are certain who it is accessing your system.
Keep those laptops as clean as possible, when it comes to client data.
It still doesn't solve the excess of data flying around in transactions but that's another issue.