Latest data theft: the Bar Council – but *they* show the government how to protect data

The Bar Council has just notified Geeklawyer that a thief broke into their premises and nicked a laptop and four hard-drives full of embarrassing data: the partial financial records of barristers; their names and addresses; names of the Great and the Good of the Bar Council and the Bar Standards Board; the names of complainants against barristers.

Bad huh? Sounds like the Government loosing the traditional taxpayer/MI5/MI6 data on the taxi/train/Clapham Rickshaw. Well, no. The Data was all casually unusable since it was password protected.

Props to the Bar Council for engaging in safe data-intercourse. One wonders however, given the weakness of Microsoft password protection of documents, whether this was mere password protection of the data, or encryption? The latter would make it unusable but the prevalence of password cracking tools would make the former a less than 'state of the art' form of protection, although clearly better than the Government level protection of rice paper umbrellas in a Monsoon.

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