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Just How Safe is Your Laptop?
August 6, 2011
With the declining prices of laptops, the portable computer is rapidly becoming the PC of choice for many business professionals. Working from home is much simpler when the user can carry the PC home and not lose a step. This convenience is not without risk.
According to Absolute Software CEO John Livingston the number of laptops stolen each year pushes 700,000 units. Nearly every day we read of a laptop stolen with confidential data stored on the hard drive. Consider the August 2009 case of a laptop computer stolen from the car of a BlueCross BlueShield employee containing unencrypted personal data of 850,000 physicians. The data included names, addresses, tax ID numbers, and national provider identification numbers. Approximately 187,000 of those physicians used their Social Security numbers (SSNs) as their tax ID or national provider numbers. This is simply one case in thousands of similar occurrences. The number one rule of data security is "no one thinks anything bad will happen to them until it does" and theft of confidential information contained on a laptop is definitely something bad.
If you or someone in your firm uses a laptop, here are two simple but necessary steps to take to ensure you or your firm is not the next headline:
- If you must take a laptop away from the office, do NOT store any personal or private information on it. Instead, see if your IT department or consultant can securely link you back to your office to access the data.
- If the first rule is not possible or practical, then you must encrypt your laptop's hard drive. www.truecrypt.org offers free software for this purpose.
These are really the only two options for laptop computers. Anything less causes you to play a dangerous game of risk with your company's information, reputation, and even its survival. Is that risk really worth it? If you have any questions on this subject or any other, please call me on my direct line at (330) 493-5227.
by: David H. Besse, MCSE, CISSP, CISA
