More fines for UK councils who lose unencrypted laptops

Last week the Information Commissioner's Office issued 2 more fines, this time to Ealing and Hounslow. In both cases they lost laptops containing unencrypted personal data.

The amounts were fairly modest, £80,000 and £70,000 respectively.

Ealing council had a policy in place, so it looks like they hadn't rolled out the technology to implement it.

Security needs more than a nice statement of intent, it needs simple tools in place for all staff. And simple does not mean a vague reference to PGP or using disk encryption. These sort of tools are far to complex for most of us.

Some councils are getting it right. In 2009 when Lancashire council lost 4 laptops, they were remote wiped before anything nasty happened. Councils like Leicester and South Gloucester are using safedrop to send large and sensitive files, giving protection from mis-addressing and interception.

When your staff need to share sensitive files, what tools are available? Check it's not email or ftp.

free upgrade - we’ve just added recipient verification to all accounts

The default security level for safedrop has just got higher. Now when you send a safedrop, any recipient will have to prove their identity before they can get it. When they receive your message link, if they haven’t accessed safedrop on that computer before, they will be requested to enter a short text string sent by email.

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safedrop - new look and feel, better simplicity, better security

We've just upgraded the web interface. It's prettier, simpler, easier to use, and we hope reflects the simplicity of our service.

As a bonus, you can now send to multiple recipients through the web.  Just cut & paste lots of emails into the recipients field.

We've also protected your message history with email tokens, adding an extra level of security. So even if someone compromised your password, they would need your email as well to see the details any messages that are still live.

Did we do good job? We want to be the best secure messaging on the planet - let us know if we can do anything better.

safedrop receipts

Now when you send a safedrop you'll notice the receipt has 1 extra line:

You can monitor activity on this SafeDrop here. You can also expire the drop, or change it's expiry date.

This is actually pretty powerful - now if you want to revoke a message just click the receipt and expire it. 
It's also one handy place with a complete history of who's accessed your safedrop.

New feature - secure message

Last week we sneaked in a new feature - secure messages. Now when you send a safedrop there’s an extra field ‘Secure Message’. The normal message gets placed in the email, and the new Secure Message will only be displayed once the recipient has got to the safedrop. If you select ‘delete on download’ they will see the message only once.

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C++ battlefield communication systems developer joins the team!

** employee safety checks. All new starts at PROJECTFUSION are security screened to the BS 7858 standard. We don’t give anyone access to the production servers until they have worked with us for at least 12 weeks. This adds an extra level of security for our clients data. Only 3 people have access to production data.

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