Tulsa police are looking for the thief that forced his way into a home and stole a laptop computer…and a dog. A Maltese, more specifically. If you’re familiar with that particular breed, you know the little fella wasn’t there to protect the computer. Speaking of which, it contained plenty of private information: names, addresses, phone numbers, SSNs, medical records, and other good stuff. Unfortunately, the computer in question did not use laptop encryption software like AlertBoot to protect all that data. The only protection in place, besides the presence of the dog, was the front door which the thieves kicked in (subtle!), according to the report.
Whether the theft of the laptop computer will actually lead to a data breach is debatable. As most information security experts will point out, the conversion rate, if you will, of computer thefts to information security breaches is quite low. On the other hand, it’s also true that this is an assumption. Even if it were a documented, verifiable truth, I would presume that such statistics are lagging to current events: that is, it may have been true five years ago, but it may not necessarily be so now.
For starters, there has been so much coverage in the media regarding stolen information and identity theft that I doubt even petty thieves don’t realize the value of a stolen computer lies in the information contained within. Plus, the problem with statistics is that people tend to remember what they heard the first time around (behavioral psychologists call this phenomenon “anchoring”), and never follow up to see what’s happened since, so there’s a lot of old data making the rounds.
Then, there’s the fact that, supposedly, the thieves passed through the living room and stole her laptop computer from the dining room. If I were targeting a random home, and kicked in the front door, causing a lot of noise, I would steal the first thing that I could easily lay my hands on and sprint away with. Like a DVD player, for example, or a Wii…Christmas is around the corner and there’s bound to be a shortage. I certainly wouldn’t scan the room, note things of interest, and move over to another room to see what other goodies were available. Makes one wonder if the computer was targeted. The police don’t think so. And supposedly there were 54 break-ins in the area this year alone, so it’s kind of a high-crime area.
I guess what’s important to remember is that any place where you normally could have a break-in, regardless of whether there was one or not, is not a good place to keep sensitive data. Like your home or your car.
However, life happens to be a juggling act, and people will take their work home. The fact that work means dealing with sensitive information is irrelevant in a society where the pressure is there to perform…or else. It seems to me that it would be best to arm such mobile workers with the right security tools. There are different ways of approaching it. Some recommend VPNing, or logging in remotely but securely, into a network. After all, If you don’t save data to a laptop, its theft cannot lead to a proper data breach -- there is no sensitive information stored on the device.
On the other hand, how can you guarantee that all of your employees are living in an area where stable internet connections are available? You can’t, unless you’re willing to relocate everyone to where such networks are available. VPN is not feasible in many instances.
The alternative is to use encryption software products like hard disk encryption to protect the contents of laptop computers, or to ensure usb disk data security for external hard drives. And if you’re not looking to protect everything within the computer’s hard disk, you can go with file encryption, and ensure that only those files that need protection are encrypted.
Related Articles:http://www.fox23.com/news/local/story.aspx?content_id=ffe4847e-8623-43b7-9f18-29c66c776f3a