Secure it or Lose it
Secure it or Lose it
July 26, 2007: With incidents of laptop loss and theft on the rise and information security more important than ever, Fujitsu has released its thoughts on the best way to secure your laptop inside and out. The short of it is: if you think antivirus and a desk lock is all you need then it’s time to think again.
With increasing amounts of critical business and personal information now hitting the streets by our sides, it has never been more important to ensure that your data is secure. Whether it be from viruses, theft or unwitting exposure of sensitive data, Fujitsu pegs laptop security as mandatory these days.
“With the growing ease of notebooks being stolen and hacked into, gone are the days where anti-virus programmes, VPN firewalls and physical locks sufficed as security measures for notebooks owners”, said David Niu, Fujitsu PC Australia’s Product Manager. “All notebook owners should secure their notebooks not only on the software level, but from hardware and physical thefts as well.”
The company says that many people believe an antivirus program and a Kensington computer lock is where protection begins and ends, but in today’s threat landscape much stronger and more comprehensive security measures must be deployed to protect assets and data and secure realistic peace of mind.
With theft and loss of laptops on the rise, information security is having an increasingly greater impact on security, with some reports placing it above spam and malware in some what’s-keeping-IT-executives-up-at-night studies.
Confidential and personal information can so easily be lifted off hard drives (often just by turning on a machine and having a rummage around) that if you aren’t employing some form of hardware password and at least partial data encryption then you’re basically opening your filing cabinet to every thief with an IQ over 80 and a copy of GetDataBack for Windows XP.
In order to secure your information, Fujitsu has a number of recommendations. First, one should use a security panel or some other method of hardware lockdown that modern laptops employ to ensure stolen machines cannot boot without the right code. Use a BIOS password as the second line of defence and if available, a hard disk that can be locked and encrypted with a password to ensure that even if the whole system is dismantled your data remains locked up tight.
Next to these measures, Fujitsu offers Trusted Platform Module (TPM) with many of its corporate notebooks. The company says TPM is a hardware-level device that maintains the privacy by protecting sensitive data stored in both the hardware and authenticating the platform, and protecting any unauthorised use of digital signatures and random number and key generations.
Finally, when it comes to workflow security, Fujitsu recommends the use of a biometric system such as a fingerprint scanner to consolidate the myriad online passwords users have to deal with these days, enabling simple and secure logging in to webpages and encrypted files and folders.
While implementing all of these suggestions in one system could seem like overkill, a combination of hardware and software security is fast becoming a mandatory part of mobile computing. For peace of mind hardware lockdown via BIOS password and hard disk-level encryption is certainly an attractive way to go. Especially considering every notebook has the ability to set a BIOS password.
Beyond this there are some great open source data encryption offerings out there (TrueCrypt for example) if your hard disk doesn’t offer onboard encryption.
Better secure than sorry!
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