ClickSafe Laptop Lock from Kensington

Have you ever been concerned about the safety of your laptop? Well, Kensington has been providing computer accessories and peripherals to consumers since 1981 when they released their System Saver, a cooling fan and surge protector for the Apple II. The newest addition to their line of security devices is the ClickSafe Laptop Lock. Although the product may not completely prevent a thief from stealing your laptop, it will definitely slow them down.

So what exactly is the ClickSafe Lock you may ask? Well, its design is very similar to that of a bike lock. The outside is comprised of a hard plastic, while the inside is made up of a carbon reinforced cable. The ClickSafe weighs a mere 0.41 pounds and features a wire that can be stretched 61 inches. This allows you enough room to anchor the device onto a chair or table leg.

To attach the anchor the ClickSafe utilizes the case slot of a laptop. Attaching the lock is a single step process that gives you instant security. Unfortunately, some older laptops and a few newer ones do not support the case slot that is necessary to utilize the ClickSafe device. Most laptops support a case slot except, surprisingly, the MacBook Air and the Toshiba Portege R705-P35.

Along with the anchor and the cable, Kensington also includes two keys, a plastic holder for the anchor and small tool to screw in the anchor. One important thing to note is that you should probably register your two keys with Kensington because if you happen to lose them, it will be almost impossible to get the lock off.

As I mentioned above, attaching the anchor and the lock is quite simple. You even hear a “click” that allows you to know that your device is truly protected and safe. Once your laptop is locked with the ClickSafe and securely fastened to a sturdy piece of furniture, it is completely impossible to pry open the lock. The wire has even been tested to see if someone would be able to destroy it so that they could get away with your laptop. Scissors were able to easily cut through the plastic covering of the wire, but to actually cut the carbon cable itself would take hours of labor intensive work. To snap the cord it would be necessary to utilize bolt cutters.

Unfortunately, the ClickSafe Laptop Lock cannot completely guarantee that your laptop will not be stolen, but it will definitely give you some confidence in the fact that it will definitely make stealing your laptop a very difficult and tedious task. This key lock from Kensington may seem to be more focused towards business users, but the company has promised that they will be releasing a combination lock sometime this spring that will be designed more for the average consumer.

The Kensington ClickSafe Laptop Lock can give users added assurance about the security of their laptop. If you utilize you laptop often in public places, I think that it is a great idea to have extra security like a laptop lock. If you’re interested in making sure that your laptop is extra safe, the ClickSafe Laptop Lock could be exactly what you need.

The ClickSafe Laptop Lock is now available from Kensington for $69.99.

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Worst Possible Passwords

Do you really spend much time coming up with passwords for the variety of different websites that you utilize? Do you ever think about whether or not they’re really secure? Now if its some unimportant website that just happens to need a password, then maybe its not a big deal, but if its something like your online banking, then I think that you should definitely pay a little more attention.

This December, the popular photo sharing site, rockyou.com, was hacked. A list of user names and passwords was exposed on the Web for everyone to see. About a month later, Imperva, a security analysis firm, had compiled the most common passwords for the site, and it was pretty crazy.

The most popular password by a long shot was “123456.” 290,731 users utilized this simplistic password. 79,078 users had the less complex “12345” as their password. This was able to fulfill the minimum character requirement set down by the site, but obviously does very little for security.

Security experts have been telling people for years that they need to use more complex, secure passwords, especially since hackers are becoming more and more sophisticated. The RockYou analysis showed that 30 percent of users chose to use a password that was less than six characters long and 40 percent of their users only used lowercase letters in their password.

Imperva released a report that stated, “Assuming an attacker with a DSL connection of 55KBPS upload rate and that each attempt is 0.5KB in size, it means that the attacker can have 110 attempts per second. At this rate, a hacker will gain access to one new account every second or just less than 17 minutes to compromise 1000 accounts.”

Other popular passwords that surfaced included: “password,” “rockyou” the website’s name, “abc123,” and simple first names. Imperva gave some tips on creating a password. They recommended that users evade any letter and number combination passwords that appear in the dictionary. To have the strongest possible password, it is recommended that you use both upper and lower case letters and incorporate some numbers and special characters. Imperva showed that a mere 4% of users have special characters in their password. They said, “Just ten years ago, hacked Hotmail passwords showed little change. This means that the users, if allowed to, will choose very weak passwords even for sites that hold their most private data.”

People just need to be careful. It may not seem like a big deal at first, but when your own account gets hacked into, I think that it will seem a little bigger deal than you might have thought.

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