News

Mobile phone security and wireless hacking...

In the middle of the current new scare about wireless hacking and hijacking, here's a question: how many people have quite secure mobile phones, but leave them by the roadside?

Mountains of mobiles are left every day by fretful and forgetful travellers at the back of city cabs as passengers rush to leave taxis for their next destination.

In the last six months alone, Londoners have forgotten a staggering 54,874 mobile phones* (that’s over 2 per taxi), 4,718 handhelds or Pocket PCs, 3,179 laptops and 923 USB sticks/thumb drives at the back of licensed taxi cabs and that’s just the ones that have been reported as lost!"

The stat comes verbatim from "The Taxi survey – 2006/7" which was conducted by Pointsec.

The press release describes them as "experts in security for mobile devices together with licensed taxi companies in 11 major cities around the world, including London, Sydney, Munich, Berlin, Frankfurt, Oslo, Helsinki, Stockholm, San Francisco, Washington and Bombay.

In London the survey was carried out amongst 220 of the 24,000 licensed taxi drivers.  Each country surveyed around 250 taxi drivers and extrapolated the figures based on the number of taxis in each city.

More information from www.pointsec.com