67,000 Phones Will be Lost or Stolen at London Olympics

A report suggests that the number of smartphones lost during the Olympics will soar and that huge amounts of personal and corporate data is at risk.

The figure of 67,000 smartphones has been estimated by security experts Venafi, and is based on figures from 2010 which suggested that 20,000 phone were lost or stolen every single day in the UK.

Venafi has extrapolated this to take into account the Games's 17-day duration, the huge explosion of smartphone sales since 2010 and the influx of visitors to London during the Games, and come up with the 67,000 figure.

According to Venafi, of the total figure, 26,800 will be smartphones and that each of these will have on average 8GB of storage space. This means a total of 214.4TB of data could be compromised, which equates to around 200 million books' worth, taking each book to consist of 1MB of data.

The recent BYOD (bring your own device) phenomenon means that more people are carrying more personally-owned devices at any given time than ever before. These powerful, network-enabled devices can access, process and store a great deal of data, much of it valuable and often-regulated business data.

It is the corporate data that is stored on these smartphones that people - and their employers - should be most worried about: "There's been an explosion of corporate data available to users from their mobile devices. This is a real danger and one that is often overlooked," said Gregory Webb, Venafi Vice President of Marketing.

"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."