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Phone (News - Alert) theft is always a big problem in London. Over any normal two-week period, 50,000 phones will be stolen in the area. But over the next two weeks it won’t be just any two week period. With the Olympics approaching this week, London’s population will inflate, increasing the potential for stolen mobile devices.

Venafi, a security enterprise that focuses on encryption keys and digital certificates, has predicted that approximately 67,000 phones will be lost during the Olympic two-week period. The additional 17,000 comes from the fact that the current London population will increase by about a third from the Olympics, which should statistically also increase the number of phones stolen by a third.

Along with the physical devices being stolen, Venafi also figured that approximately 40 percent of the phones stolen will be smartphones, resulting in about 214.4 terabytes of data being stolen. To get an idea of how much data that is, if you were to write it all in books you would have over 200 million books of data.

And these figures only include smartphones. There’s a chance tablets or smartphones could also be stolen, yielding even more data ending up in the wrong hands.

“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’s 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,” he added. “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.”

Venafi suggests businesses and anyone with high-profile data should apply encryption and digital certificates to guarantee proper authentication and effective data protection.

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