Columns

There's an odd synchronicity to the current issue of PC Pro. Much as I'd love to claim that we plan it months in advance, the speed of the industry we write about means the final combination of news, features and reviews is dictated as much by luck as it is by judgement, and the whims of fancy have declared the need for security to run through this edition.

It's a truth echoed in my own life. Unusually, and much to our cats' chagrin, we abandoned the house for Christmas. Two days before we left, I decided to quell the nagging doubts in my mind and set up a home security system.

The first step was to dig out my webcam, which had been left to gather dust since I purloined it about 18 months ago. I downloaded a copy of the open-source Dorgem for free, thus adding the ability to capture motion. Within 20 minutes (although I'm not counting the ten minutes it took to open the webcam's blister plastic packaging) I'd done it.

Admittedly, it was a bit Heath Robinson: my notebook trying to look innocuous underneath a table in the hallway, the webcam hidden behind a plant pot, but if you fancy a more discreet system you can get a pinhole camera integrated into a clock.

Luckily, the only images I was sent involved our cat sitter and a pair of ravenous felines, but perhaps that's not surprising: these days, it seems criminals prefer softer targets than robbing

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people's houses. During December, we ran several stories about Ebay fraud, and the lack of police interest (or ability, resources, call it what you will) in tackling it.

E-crime seems as high up the police priority list as eight-year-olds stealing packets of Polo mints from the local newsagent, when in fact it's organised crime for the 21st century. Ebay is particularly susceptible to the problem, as it builds a system of trust into its store mechanism: if the person you're buying from has a 99.9% satisfaction rating, you won't think twice about handing over £50. But if that account has been hijacked, by the time you start to complain that your goods haven't arrived and leave negative feedback, another 100 people will have been lured into the trap.

To a limited extent, this is within our control: stick with PayPal and follow the "if it's too good to be true then it probably is" rule (we talk about this in greater depth in our December podcast). But there isn't much we can do when third parties lose our data for us.

The scale of the government's recent loss - those much-publicised CDs with the names, addresses and bank details of 25 million people who claim child benefit - still defies belief. Davey Winder is already labelling it "datagate" in his Online column, and it's hard to argue with that sentiment. Watergate may have been about lies and corruption, but incompetence when handling data has the potential to affect every single one of us.

The worst thing is that, most of the time, it's down to the media to reveal the failures of big business and government. Take The Times, which broke the story about Britons' bank details being downloaded for free), and found more than 100 websites selling bank details.