LONDON (Reuters) - Laptops containing sensitive financial details and all manner of corporate secrets can be snapped up at auctions for a pittance, a security firm revealed on Wednesday.
Stockholm-based Pointsec Mobile Technologies said it bought 100 laptop computers from a host of Internet and public auctions over the past two months.
The exercise intended to demonstrate that the scores of lost or stolen laptops that wind up at auction every day have hard drives with little or no security, giving identity thieves and fraudsters easy access to lucrative data. What it did not expect to find was a cache of corporate laptops too that were as easy to crack as grandma's PC. In all, the firm's technicians were able to pull sensitive details from 70 of the 100 machines it bought.
In one case, it obtained a particularly vulnerable hard drive from online auction site eBay that apparently once belonged to one of Europe's largest insurance companies.
On the hard drive were current details of customers' pension plans, payroll records, personnel details, login codes and administration passwords for the company's Intranet site. Home addresses, telephone numbers and dates of birth of customers were also listed in 77 Microsoft Excel files, the company said.