Laptops are great - I know I’ll appreciate having one this winter; my basement office gets drafty and gas for the stove is just too expensive to crank it the way I’d like to. So, I’ll be using my trusty Macbook upstairs at the dining room table quite a bit. Like right now.
If you take your Macbook or Inspiron or Thinkpad on business trips, traveling, or even to your local coffee shop, things get a bit more complicated. Now you have to worry about somebody stealing it. Of course, there’s also network security to consider, but I’ll deal with that later.
Anyway, the estimate for the number of laptops stolen each year ranges from 600,000 to 1 millions. Yikes!
Now, I’m not as worried about the physical loss of my laptop as I’m worried about the data that’s on it. I don’t know about you, but I’d feel pretty violated knowing somebody else had access to my saved emails, address book, family photos, and so forth.
Here are a few (mostly Windows) tips that cost nothing but can help protect your data.
1. Make sure your computer account uses a password. (Settings / Control Panel / User Accounts, choose your account name and click on “Create a password”)
2. Make sure you’ve set Windows to require a login. (Settings / Control Panel / User Accounts, click “Change the ways users log on or off.” Uncheck “Use the Welcome Screen.”
3. Lock the desktop anytime you’re away from the laptop. Just press control-alt-delete, then “K” to lock.
4. Make sure your hard drive is formatted as NTFS, not FAT32. NTFS is harder to crack into. Right-click on your C: drive and select properties to see if your drive is NTFS.
5. Set your system’s screen saver to come on in a short time, and require a password to unlock it
6. Set your computer to require a password coming out of Standby mode as well.
(Some of these items apply to Mac users as well - for example, make sure your on your laptop, you have deselected the "automatically log in as..." option, and set the screen saver to ask for a password to unlock. Also see FileVault below.
Now, these tips will work fine for the causal attempt at getting into your data. If somebody steals it, takes it home, and opens the lid, they’re not going to get far unless they’re experts.
Of course, an expert who has physical access to your laptop can always pop out the hard drive and extract the data onto another computer system. That’s where encryption comes into play - if your laptop hard drive is encrypted, even a determined expert hacker is not going to be able to read your data.
You could do all of these things and still become compromised. But at least your personal information and private documents won’t be easy to see for the casual thief. Why make it any easier on scumbags than you have to?
By the way, there are also a few things you can do to help track your laptop or deal with insurance issues if it is in fact stolen. Some suggest using those hard-to-remove, metal asset tags, which help police identify stolen goods. You should definitely record your laptop’s serial number, in a separate location - not on the laptop itself.
Which now that I think about it, I haven’t done yet either.
I’ll cover network security for you road warriors next...
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