Lately, the latest security threats and news is stolen laptops. First, I ask, what the fuck is personal data doing on a company/government laptop? Second, even though I shouldn’t go past number 1, why wasn’t the data protected in any matter on a MOBILE PC. So far this year we’ve had laptops stolen and potential compromises from the US Government, a few companys, and a large Chicago Union(kept on the down-lo, but it happened, for some reason a bunch of the Union Membors information was stored on the hard drive, and it got stolen). Here are my recommended steps in not keeping your customer data in reach:

1. Don’t EVER EVER EVER store information on a laptop. This is why we have file servers and databases. A decent $800 server from dell is nothing compared to implications of getting your laptop with all your customer data stolen.
2. Encrypt the hard drive no matter what!
3. Make sure your users have safe passwords. Even shitty ass Microshit WinBlows has a feature to make sure passwords have some complexity and are changed.
4. If a user really must be able to access this information remotely, Use a damn secure VPN and have the access used over RDP or Citrix. this information should never make it to the laptop’s hard drive.
5. Keep mobile users to your users that know what the fuck they are doing!!! Do you really want to entrust a piece of equipment, and your company’s lively hood to some n00b?

This latest rant was brought to you by this article on Seagate using encryption on some new hard drives by Seagate.

This entry was posted on Monday, October 30th, 2006 at 10:51 pm and is filed under Computers, My Rants. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.