Thoughts on securing your laptop.

I recently heard the story of a laptop that was stolen from a salesperson, and the confusion that occurred because his company did not have an IT policy in place concerning portable devices. The lack of his companies planning has now surfaced, and has caused everyone a lot of grief. First all of the data that this salesperson collected is completely lost, both personal and business, and access to this data is simple due to a relaxed security policy! On top of that their lack of documentation led to a highly stressful situation while trying to contact the cellular provider to stop the account as multiple salespeople have cellular cards, but nobody bothered with creating documentation that determined which card went to which account. In fact there is no documentation that was ever made for any of their hardware.

While we all are being asked to do more with less these days, this is a perfect example of where letting your IT personnel or a provider like MLD Services help you create a hardware database that keeps track of which employee has which device, what hardware is tied to which accounts, such as cellular providers, and what computer accounts might need to be canceled. This also provides you the added benefit of having all of this information, such as MAC addresses, serial numbers, the make, model, and color, of the hardware in one well documented and easily accessible place for when you have to file a police report. Do not underestimate the value of this information! When I worked for the U.S. Federal Government a workers home was broken into and their Government laptop stolen, but it was returned to us because of a simple property sticker on the bottom of the laptop which listed the branch of Government and our location. A simple sticker that could have been peeled off, yet the criminals took the laptop to a pawn shop with the sticker still there on the bottom. Nobody ever said criminals were very smart.

But what about the data? Sure with time the salesperson, and possibly with the help of other company personnel they will be able to recreate a lot of the lost data, but at what cost? A simple online backup solution such as the one offered by MLD Services would allow a client to restore their data to a new laptop and have the salesperson back out in the field doing what they do best, which is selling the company product, and not sitting on the sidelines recreating the data.

What about securing the data? Well most modern operating systems allow encryption of your data and with a strong password it would take years to break, and now most hardware and Operating Systems prevent booting the system from a GNU/Linux CD and mounting the drive which would then render the data readable and available to be copied! Applying these encryption methods would keep all of the information secure from all but the most determined hackers.

You should also have a password policy that sets the length of your passwords to a minimum of eight characters, and requires the use of symbols and numbers. Do not use words, names, or popular sayings.

You should also have antivirus, firewall, malware and spyware detection which probably means goodbye to the freebies such as AVG. AVG does sell a product that covers all aspects of security, but so few of us seem to be willing to pay this small fee, which is unfortunate because the AVG products are well worth the small fee that they charge.

Use a software firewall, especially while using wireless “hot spots.” Be aware that these free and open connections increase the chance of eavesdropping or hacking.

And turn off the file sharing! I was recently in a coffee shop and noticed that my MacBook had found another Mac and had mapped this users shared folder. A quick look in their folder showed photos, documents, music, and other files ready to be copied or deleted. Not very smart. I looked at the other MacBooks in the shop, guessed the owner and mentioned it to them on my way out. Their eyes were big as saucers!

While away from the office and connecting through hotspots, if your company offers VPN then use it, and use the VPN software whenever you connect to the Internet through a public wireless connection as this provides you with an encrypted connection and prevents eavesdropping.

In the end you can either take time away from your business performing these operations you have learned from this post and other posts on the Internet, or call an IT consultant, such as MLD Services who can do this for you at a fraction of the cost and time to your business. You have to remember that your time is money, and a salesman sitting at home or in the office recreating data is a salesman that is not in the field taking care of your customers, all while your competitors sales force is out there talking to your customer.

So ask yourself what is the true cost of a lost or stolen laptop and no IT policy?

There are also a number of other tools such as Loki; Adeona, locatemylaptop, and other techniques which can be employed to secure or recover stolen IT equipment, so please contact us with any questions or concerns.