And, says Andy Cordial, managing director the storage systems integration firm Origin Storage, as Russian password decryption specialist Elcomsoft's advances clearly show, it can only be a matter of time before further advances are possible.
"Elcomsoft's Password Suite shows how it is possible to dramatically speed up the rate at which an application crunches its way through password combinations using advanced hardware techniques", he said.
"You only have to look at some of the latest software from Elcomsoft, such as Advanced PDF Password Recovery, to realise that it's now possible to recover a 40-bit RC4 password-coded Adobe PDF file in a matter of minutes", he said.
"And if you look at the specification of this package, you begin to realise that certain types of AES encryption are also starting to become crackable, although you are currently talking about the kind of processing power that only governments and large corporations have access to", he added.
Cordial argues that it is only a matter of time before some coding genius moves the password recovery game on a few more stages, making a lot of encryption technologies on laptops just a few years old, infinitely more crackable.
"Can the man in the street do this? No, but the man in the testing lab can, and cybercriminals clearly now have access to parallel processing and advanced decryption technologies. It's not inconceivable that criminal gangs have cracked weaker AES crypto technologies already and are waiting for an opportunity to try out their skills", he warned.
Against this backdrop, Cordial advises users to take a multi-layered strategy to their data encryption by installing the most powerful levels of AES encryption that are currently commercially available and add on an additional layer of defence such as a passphrase security system or a biometric scanner.
Some of the latest laptops already offer fingerprint scanners as optional extras, although Cordial says that users should be selective as to which biometric applications they use to protect their data.
Passphrase protection is another valuable extra layer of defence that can be deployed in parallel with encryption.
"Users of legacy laptops that want to move on up to the benefits of encrypted drives, meanwhile, should look at the Enigma range of secure encrypted drives that we launched at the Infosecurity Europe show late last month", he said.
"As cybercriminals get smarter on the encryption cracking front, so company laptop users must use the best tools at their disposal to defend against their data falling into the wrong hands", he added.