Need a USB stick – try the laundrette

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Cases of USB sticks containing confidential information being lost are always hitting the headlines.

Earlier this month Central Lancashire Primary Care issued an apology after a health worker lost a memory stick containing the information of more than 6,000 patients from Her Majesty’s Prison Preston.

Credant Technologies, a specialist in endpoint data protection solutions, has today released the results of a survey into how often USB sticks are lost when their owners simply forget to empty their pockets before sending garment to the dry cleaners.

Credant surveyed 500 dry cleaners across the UK, and discovered that 9,000 USB sticks were found in people’s pockets in the last year alone

In a similar survey, last September, Credant discovered that 6,193 handheld devices such as laptops, iPods and USB sticks were left in the back of London taxis every 6 months.

With all the distractions of the modern world small portable devices are always going to be lost and forgotten, so the moral of the story seems to be to always make back ups of your data, and make sure that confidential information is encrypted and only carried on secure devices.