Dubai, Jan.26th, 2006 (WAM) -- Pointsec, the global leader and the provider of the de facto standard for enterprise security software for laptop and desktop PCs, PDAs and smartphones, has recently conducted an international survey on 'Lost and Found' objects in taxis across some of the major cities in the world.

Due to this investigation, businesses and individuals are being urged to use authentication and encryption tools for high memory capacity laptops and smartphones, in order to protect the sensitive information stored on them.

In London alone for instance, a staggering 63,135 mobile phones (that's an average of 3 phones per taxi), 5,838 Pocket PCs and 4,973 laptops have been left in licensed taxi cabs, in just 6 months! These figures are alarming due to the fact that in the past three and half years since the survey was first carried out, there has been a sharp increase in the number of devices being forgotten in London taxis with 71% more laptops and 350% more Pocket PCs being left than in 2001, which in the wrong hands could cause the owner and their company immeasurable damage.

The survey in London was conducted amongst licensed taxi drivers to gauge the frequency and ease with which small mobile devices are lost in transit and to highlight the need to secure sensitive, valuable or compromising information with encryption and access control. The survey has been carried out in 9 major cities around the world amongst 900 licensed taxi drivers, including Helsinki, Oslo, Munich, Paris, Stockholm, Copenhagen, Chicago and Sydney and has shown that mobile devices are forgotten universally at the back of taxis.

Long gone are the days when it was just inconvenient to lose your phone and embarrassing if your friends got an odd call from a stranger. These newer devices can give a thief access to every detail of your personal life (including personal & private / family pictures) and compromise the security of your employer's IT security or give access to their commercial data. Losing mobile devices is not a problem unique to London travellers, but a worldwide phenomenon. Londoners, however did top the charts when it came to forgetting their laptops, with more than double the number of laptops being left in the back of London taxis compared with other cities. The Danes were the most forgetful when it came to forgetting their mobile phones, in fact seven times more likely than the Germans, Norwegians and Swedes. In Chicago, USA, the mobile device most likely to be left behind were Pocket PCs, with one taxi driver reporting finding 40 in his taxi in the just 6 months! Ayman Majzoub, GM, Pointsec ME & Africa, said, "The regional adoption of mobile devices such as laptops, PDAs, and USB storage devices has grown exponentially over the last 3 years. Organizations can and should benefit from these technologies without making the same mistakes of other regions when it comes to information security breaches when these devices are lost, misplaced or even discarded. My advice to any information worker is to talk to his or her IT department about taking responsibility of securing mobile device by means of a strong and certified data encryption tool, this way your back is covered if you do lose your device." There is some good news for our absent minded colleagues though in that, if you are going to lose your mobile device, you couldn't do it a better place than a taxi! That's according to the findings of the survey, globally an average of 80% of passengers were reunited with their mobile phones and 96% with their Pocket PCs and Laptops - with the cab drivers in almost all cases tracking down their owners.

Not just mobiles, but diamonds, animals, children and a whole lot. UK taxi drivers admitted to finding a harp, a throne, ?100,000 worth of diamonds, 37 milk bottles, a dog, a hamster, a suitcase from the fraud squad and a baby. In Munich, one taxi driver was shocked when he turned around to find his passenger dead, and strangely enough it was not uncommon for taxi drivers around the world to find their passengers had forgotten dentures and artificial limbs. All were reunited with their grateful owners!