No Comments Written by Robert on July 23, 2008 – 4:08 pm

Safeguarding the information stored on your machine. For many, although losing a laptop would be an expensive event, that price pales in comparison to the value of the information stored on the hard drive. You could lose your job, your security clearance, your banking and investment information, and all sorts of sensitive corporate or personal information.

These six ideas reduce the chances that a thief or a finder-and keeper can make use of the information on your laptop:

- Be careful about what you store on your laptop. Do you really need to bring all of your personal financial records with you on every trip? Does sensitive information from your business belong on the laptop you take with you on a family vacation?

- Password-protect your Windows operating system. Although this isn’t foolproof (a technically savvy and dedicated thief can use password-cracking utilities to pick this lock), it usually prevents the casual thief from accessing your system; they may have to reformat the hard drive - erasing your sensitive data in the process - to use the laptop.

- Password-protect compressed Zip folders that hold your most sensitive data. Again, these passwords aren’t impossible to crack, but they usually stop casual and amateur thieves. (You can find out how to do this in Part V of this book.)

- Store your most sensitive data on removable storage media such as a memory key or a recordable disc. Keep that media anywhere other than in your laptop or its case. Even better, store your data in password-protected Zip folders on the media.

- Never enable your web favorites to automatically log you in with your username and password. That’s the equivalent of leaving the front door open and the safe unlocked. You can, though, use a password manager program that retains an encrypted record of all of your usernames and passwords and automatically fills them in; you need to unlock that single program each time you turn on your laptop or each time you load your Windows browser.

- For industrial-strength protection, use a hardware encryption scheme that scrambles all of your data and locks it away behind a complex password. This sort of system is almost impossible to crack.

Hard disk encryption

Hardware encryption comes in two types: one is entirely software based and the other combines a plug-in key with software protection. Kensington is among manufacturers who offer consumer-level authentication and encryption devices. The PCKey combines an access key that plugs into the laptop’s USB port with a password authentication; both the key and password are required before anyone can use the machine and any network to which it’s connected.

All data on the hard drive is encrypted; when an application requests the encoded data, it passes through the PCKey filter and is decrypted to be stored in the computer’s system memory for the application. All data written back to the hard drive is reencrypted.

PCKey software employs 128-bit Advanced Encryption Standard (AES) to encrypt data; this renders information on the drive all but impossible to read unless you’re employed by the National Security Agency and have a couple hundred supercomputers and an unlimited amount of time and money . . . you get the idea: No ordinary thief is going to be able to read your disk. If you forget your password or lose the PCKey device, contact Kensington and (after answering a set of questions) regain access to your data.