Tips for Protecting your Laptop Data

Recently, I learned the hard way that it's important to protect your laptop. When a virus wiped out my hard drive, I lost Word documents, work information, personal pictures and videos...well, the list is endless. But even then, I know it could have been much worse. What if my laptop had been stolen or being as forgetful as I am, I left it unattended somewhere? What if someone had hacked into my information? I use my laptop for everything from shopping to paying bills to keeping up with my bank accounts and it would be so easy for someone to steal my identity or gain access to confidential information.

Almost 12,000 laptops are lost each week - yes, week - in United States airports and only about 30% are ever returned to their owners. With that in mind, here are some tips on how to protect your data from the wrong people.

1. Passwords - Both your admin account and the user account should have a unique password, and some laptops allow you to set a boot password in BIOS (this one should be unique from your Windows passwords). These won't keep hard-core criminals out of your data, but they will deter your every day busybody. In both the BIOS and your user account, you can make your settings so that if someone enters the wrong password X amount of times, they get locked out of the account. And of course, don't easily guessed passwords.

2. Fingerprint Recognition - Lots of laptops come with fingerprint scanners these days and it's in your best interest to take advantage of them. It only takes a few minutes to scan each of your fingers into the system. Again, a criminal with extensive knowledge is not going to let fingerprint scans stop him, but the average person won't be able to access your data.

3. Encryption - Encryption is the best way to keep your data under wraps. You can move the drive to a new system and it is still encrypted, making it almost impossible for someone to access your data without access to your key. There are several programs you can use to encrypt your hard drive. These include: BitLocker Drive Encryption and TrueCrypt.

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Looking for Laptop Rental information? Visit our Tech Travel Agent Laptop Rental Page for a variety of laptop rental solutions for business or personal use. Or call today at 800-736-8772.

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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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Looking for Laptop Rental information? Visit our Tech Travel Agent Laptop Rental Page for a variety of laptop rental solutions for business or personal use. Or call today at 800-736-8772.

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