Beaverton - Aug-10th 2012 - As it seems that losing your laptop can end up costing you more than what your laptop is actually worth, this actual fact has proven to be even truer in the latest incident related to patient data theft that occurred in Stanford hospital. Thieves broke through a locked doctor’s office and stole the laptop, what’s worrying is that the laptop contained the personal data of 2,500 patients. Information stored within the laptop contained data such as patient names, locality of service and remedial record numbers, treatment histories, age records and social security numbers. The hospital has informed its patients about the data theft, urged them to look for signs of identity theft. Moreover, the theft is being thoroughly investigated by campus police. According the data theft expert Jonathan Ladd, incidents such as these do not surprise him. Ladd, being a data security expert is well familiar with the data thief’s mindset. According to Ladd, these thieves had already scoped the hospital out and knew exactly what they were doing. They knew exactly which laptop they needed to steal and how to steal it. Ladd warns, people should be very careful about discarding their old laptop as data thieves will actively seek your discarded laptop and will try to retrieve personal information from it and the same goes for discarded smart phones. Another disturbing trend leading to data theft Ladd pointed out is that losing your USB flash drive can also lead to data theft. Lost or stolen portable drives can contain a wealth of information which is far easier to extract compared to a laptop’s hard-drive. Ladd highly recommended that users should secure USB portable drives with portable data security software, engineered to protect data from ID thieves. Without such software, ordinary folks who use portable drives are at serious risk. For more information please visit:
http://www.newsoftwares.net/usb-secure/