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Computer Security - How To Protect Yourself

LoTech Security: Wheel Locks & WoJack for the Wireless

Okay, your wireless network is wrapped up tighter than a drum and your laptop is practically impregnable. Then you zone out and forget your computer at Starbucks or, worse, somebody steals it. No matter how tech we get, stuff happens; people just lose things. Data at rest is at risk if the device is lost. Here are two radically different cures for this problem:

Pointsec and Smartner provide peace-of-mind that the data will not fall into the wrong hands. The solution combines Pointsec's FIPS encryption with Smartner's Always-On Mail to centrally manage security policies for mobile devices and push out changes and updates. It uses 128-bit AES (Advanced Encryption Standard) to protect data.

Encryption is initiated at the normal screen time-out. Legal users can easily retrieve data by logging in and re-authenticating with the system. Anyone who cannot authenticate themselves as you, cannot access the data. Anyone who finds the device can’t see anything.

To dramatize the problem, Pointsec conducted a nine-nation survey of cab companies to see how frequently devices are left behind. A Chicago cab company reported the highest number of losses in the survey. On average, 3.42 mobile phones and .86 PDAs and Pocket PCs per cab were left behind each day. Over six months, the survey estimated that Chicago cab riders lost 85,619 mobile phones; 21,460 PDAs/Pocket PCs; and 4,425 laptops.

Coming from another angle, Apple guru Steve Wozniak has introduced "wOz Location-Based Encryption," an application that uses GPS. Hundreds of thousands of notebooks and laptops are stolen or lost every year and 98 percent are never recovered.

With wOz Location-Based Encryption, companies can guard against the unauthorized removal of data outside of safe zones by using broadband Wi-Fi GPS tracking tied to the proprietary wOzNet, which serves as a local wireless network. The application uses a dongle, a device that controls access to applications, attached to the laptop to communicate wirelessly with a base station. The location of the laptop is known at all times and access is denied if a safe zone is breached.

When the employee logs in, the device automatically requests valid zone information from the dongle. Once the preset zones are approved, the dongle regularly requests GPS positioning as a key to decrypting data to allow access. Once everything clears approval, the dongle decrypts the data, automatically blocking an employee or a thief from picking up a laptop and moving out of a building without approval. Once the computer is removed from the physical zone, the keys are lost or unavailable, and the hard disk is gibberish. If the dongle is removed, the base station automatically detects it.  In addition, using device-location history, a cookie-crumb trail will help with retrieval of the stolen or lost laptop, he said.

Lost and found has gone hi-tech.