NEW DELHI, INDIA: According to a recent information security survey conducted by PCQuest of around 90 CIOs, nearly 40 per cent said that they had suffered from laptop theft, which was the highest of all other security incidents.
As the number of laptops is bound to grow in the organization, these incidents will only increase. Another more serious issue is with the loss of data on stolen laptops. Data is of course far more valuable than the cost of laptops themselves. Then, there's an even more serious issue of that data being mis-used. So the obvious question is, what should you do?
The answer according to the same survey is to encrypt your hard drive and use data loss prevention solutions.
A majority of respondents had plans of adopting both in their organization. Given the high demand for hard drive encryption, in this article, we've talked about how it's done. Most laptops these days come with a TPM (Trusted Platform Module) chip, which can store the public key of an encrypted hard drive. In this article, we'll talk about how to use this feature along with some hard disk encryption software.
Next comes the issue of laptop theft. Currently, there are various online services that promise to help you track your laptop if it gets stolen. So later in this section, we've covered five different online services that offer you this capability, and tell you the best one.
Lastly, another thing you might want to do is to check with your laptop vendors on whether they offer any kind of laptop protection services. These could be helpful in cases of laptop or data theft. Some vendors offer insurance of both the laptop and data on them. Some even offer port locking capabilities, so that you can control port usage. This can be useful in data leakage prevention.
Encrypting Data on Notebooks
One of the biggest concerns for laptop users is to save their data in case the laptop or its hard drive is accessed by someone with malicious intent. One can easily bypass any kind of OS level security by just booting a machine with Live OS or by taking out the hard drive of the machine and connecting to another machine as a secondary volume.
