67,000 phones to go missing at London 2012 Olympics

We are just a matter of days away from the London 2012 Olympics, where dreams will be made, national pride will be at stake and, if experts are to be believed, 67,000 smartphones will be either lost or stolen.

The ceaselessly rising popularity of smartphones has meant that they are inevitably becoming a popular object to pike. London sees 50,000 phones stolen in any two-week period, and it looks like this figure will increase by around a third during the course of the Olympics.

Network security specialists Venafi somehow also managed to calculate that, with such an amount of stolen devices, around 214.4 terabytes worth of precious data will be stolen.

“There’s been an explosion of corporate data available to users from their mobile devices,” said Gregory Webb, Venafi’s Vice President of Marketing. “This is a real danger and one that is often overlooked.”

“People don’t consider or take action to protect the vast volumes of information they carry and have internet access to. With the ever-shrinking boundaries between work devices and work-enabled personal devices, lost or stolen smartphones and other mobile devices that fall into the wrong hands place companies and business data at tremendous risk.”

If you’re a proud smartphone owner who’ll be attending the Olympics, then the next few week will be a more crucial time than any to obsessively keep your phone close to your person at all times. You have been warned.

[via: T3]