A lost laptop or how to have your identity stolen and expose other peoples credit card information
September 21st, 2006
Losing a laptop can cause a lot of grief, the lost photos from the holiday in Swiss Alps is ofton the smallest problem, private information in the wrong hands can be a lot bigger, especially when it is not only your own information.
With a standard Windows XP installation the protection is very poor, even when using boot up bios passwords and a password protected account. There are many ways to crack a laptop.
The main problem is, that most data on the harddrive is in unencrypted form - making it possible for anyone with physical access to the drive to read the data of the drive.
How to protect the sensitive data
There are some different ways to keep your sensitive data safe
1)Keep the data completely of the hard drive.
Use the laptop as terminal. Boot from a live-cdrom or the image of one. But don’t keep the data of the hard drive. Access the data via an encrypted network connection like ssh or vpn. The advantage is that if the file data is only stored in the ram it should be completely of once the laptop is restarted.
One efficient way to this is to use remote access protocols (VNC, Windows Terminal Service…etc), in this case the data will never be on the local laptop since everything will be going on on the server.
2)Keep the data on the hard drive but encrypted
Encrypt a partition: an encrypted drive can be an efficient protection. Just be carefull that backups or other copies of the data are not saved outside the encrypted partion.
You can use a encrypted data partition, along an unencrypted system partition for
Truecrypt is efficient for this. Read an overview here or a howto in encrypting a drive here.
Encrypt the data file by file:Possible, and maybe a solution if it is very few files which is only accessed rarely. This can be done by GnuPG or similar.
Conclusion
As a ordinary home user, with mostly none-sensible data I find an encrypted partition to be the the obvios choice, since it requires no server and use free software (truecrypt) it is very cheap. The data can still be compromised, but it is difficult and requires time and resources.
UPDATE
——————————————————
A great article about how easy it is to break in to a mac, if you have physical access.
Leave a Comment
You must be logged in to post a comment.
Trackback this post | Subscribe to the comments via RSS Feed