Richard Stagg, senior security architect at Information Risk
Management, said: "There will be an encryption system on the
laptop. It's an accepted fact that occasionally laptops will be
stolen, and this is a case of due diligence on the part of MI5
being put to use."
Stagg said that although every laptop from MI5 would have
encryption built in, it was still possible that information
contained in cookies and in swap files would be present on the PC
in an unencrypted form.
Graham Cluley of Sophos said there was a question over whether
the whole hard disk was encrypted. Some disk encryption products
create a partition on which encrypted files are placed, and this
technique leaves some files in plain text.
