How To Vex Laptop Thieves
Nothing can give you sleepless nights more than your laptop disappearing at the internet cafe. Sure, you can buy the latest one- but it’s the data that matters. If you’re the average bloke, chances are that little notebook of yours holds not just lovenotes and a secret porn stash, but also financial documents, credit card cookies and a masterfile full of your passwords. That’s what the thieves salivate over. Not the cheap laptop housing it.
“But I got encryption!”
Ha. Double Ha. Visit security forums and you’ll discover how miscreants find it so easy to steal encryption keys that products like Vista’s Bitlocker relies on. Encrytion confounds the garden variety hacker- but not the determined corporate raider. Good thing there’s a better solution now.
Imagine how nice it would be if information could just self-destruct when your laptop meanders away from a secure location. Poof! There goes the data- and a very vexed thief to go with it.
Virtuity proposes the exact solution with a service called BackStopp. The way it works is simple. The hosted service follows laptops using internet connection or wif-fi and GPRS. If the device owner sends an urgent message, or if the unit transfers outside a secure location, Backstop issues commands that wirelessly blanks out the drive.
Some savvy thieves may attempt to disable wi-fi or cellular connections but there’s yet another failsafe. Backstopp deploys RFID (radio frequency tags) to trigger a last ditch call to delete critical data. How’s that for extreme? Once the data is secure, the webcam goes online and snaps a few shot- hopefully taking capturing the malefactor’s ugly mug and broadcasting it to the police.
Think you’ll invest?
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Comment by Brendan Cooper on 21 August 2008:
My understanding is that the Dell Latitudes have a similar function built in.
Of course, if we could all use cloud computing for all our apps all the time - without fear that we’ll be locked out, or that there’ll be downtime, or that the operators will go bust or indeed lose the data themselves - then this wouldn’t be so much of an issue.
Read Brendan Cooper’s latest blog post….Question: what is the best laptop for computer music and online?>>>
Comment by Narayanan Hariharan on 23 August 2008:
I think I will invest cos i’m crazy about my data and security and there’s nothing as worse as giving all my data to some lucky loafer..
Comment by Ps3 man on 7 September 2008:
A big problem here is complacency. The longer you go without a problem the more casual you get about backups and security. It sometime takes an incident (e.g. loss of laptop) to make people realise what they need to do.
Comment by kidlet on 13 September 2008:
I’d have to agree with Brendan’s cloud computing comment. Dumb terminals or cloud computing would allow users to store the majority of data in a secure environment while incurring minimal risk if the ‘dumb’ notebook is lost or stolen.
Combine this with the security tools you write about in the original post and you’ve got a pretty tight setup.
Read kidlet’s latest blog post….New Butt Freckle Toys For Kids!!>>>