According to the Washington Post for on the black market these days, a full identity (name, SSN, address, bank information, etc) can go for $14 each.

University of Miami officials last week acknowledged that six backup tapes from its medical school that contained more than 2 million medical records was stolen in March from a van that was transporting the data to an off-site facility.

So a payday of $28 million beckons.

The massive growth rate in smartphones has been driven by the iPhone. The last quarter of 07 is up a stunning 60% year on year.

At the end of last year, BlackBerry had a 40 percent share of the United States smartphone market, down from 45 percent at the end of 2006, thanks largely to the 17.4 percent share the iPhone grabbed in its first six months.

There is great fun ahead with Android and Windows is getting more prominent.

A Mexican diplomat Rafael Quintero Curiel was caught stealing six or seven blackberrys from a meeeting table in the White House. He was caught on cctv,sources said he made it all the way to the airport before Secret Service officers caught up with him. He denied taking the blackberrys initally, but after agents showed him the cctv footage, Quintero Curiel said it was a mistake, gave them back, claimed diplomatic immunity and left with the Mexican delegation

Bad Guys are moving away from well protected network attacks to targetting devices such as blackberrys and iphones. According to ex White House advisor Howard Schmidt the availability of software developer kits is making it easier for the bad guys to build software to target these devices.

An international violinist Philippe Quint left a €4 million violin in the back of a NYC mini-cab.

The driver, Mohamed Khalil, was unaware of the treasure on the back seat and left it there outside his home overnight. The slightly stressed Quint dropped to his knees with tears of joys when reunited the following day.

Up to a fifth of UK PC users are willing to turn over their passwords in exchange for a chocolate bar, according to a recent survey.

Yahoo report that people will break the ultimate security taboo for a moro, crunchie or maybe even a toblerone. Women were more likely to agree.

So it should be very easy to spot data thieves wandering offices with a trolley full of cadburys - we are a strange bunch !!

A stunning 42.4 million bags have been lost / delayed by the aviation industry. This is out of a total of 2.25 billion items processed - approx 2% which costs them $3.8 billion.
Travelmole quotes the CEO of IATA “We get baggage right 98% of the time. But with a total volume of over 2.2 billion bags in the system, the 2% that is mis-handled is a big problem that we need to fix. IATA has developed a toolkit of 40 solutions designed to address the prime causes of baggage mishandling. And, because every airport is different, IATA Baggage Go Teams will visit targeted airports spreading best practice solutions matched to local needs.”

The beta software is live on the site - thanks for all the interest. Any and all feedback will be appreciated.

Bank of Ireland are installing encryption on 5000 of their laptops in the next weeks after 10,000 customer details were compromised after 4 laptops were stolen. This was the top story on RTE news at 9pm, this issue is getting more prominent as time goes on.

800,000 phones are stolen annually in the UK. A large number are blocked using the imei number but it hasnt stymied the increase in stolen phones. BBC have an interesting article on reasons that they are still being taken.
Any security software can be broken and many phones are shipped abroad, the thief if involved in a burgulary takes anything they can get their hands on.