Protect Your Laptop

As we become more and more mobile in our working arrangement, laptops become more and more common PC for most. It is nice to be able to work anywhere in the office or home or on the road without the restriction of a bulky desktop. With this mobility comes added security challenges, namely two that I will address:

• Connecting to public wi-fi hotspots
  If you enjoy the convenience of your laptop in those open WiFi hotspots at coffee shops or other public places, you need to know that someone could be monitoring your every move and stealing information from what you're doing. How is that possible, you may ask? This kind of attack is known as the "Evil Twin". This is how it work. It is possible for someone to set up his laptop in a public place to send out a wireless signal indicating that it's a legitimate T-Mobile connection, for example. And he sits fairly close by, which makes the signal strong for your laptop. And computers most typically choose the strongest signal to connect to automatically. While posing as an encrypted connection the Evil Twin acts as a go-between to your laptop and wherever you visit, example your email site. And he can record every information that pass through his laptop, such as user names, passwords, credit card numbers, and other vital information. This not only happens in public hotspots. Even in residential homes, it is possible to set up traps like this. You need a Internet connection and your wireless connection display a unsecured access point close by with a reasonably strong signal. You took the bait and connect to the Internet via this access point. And on the other end, the attacker is having a great time collecting your information, without you even being aware of it. Hopefully you now see the danger lurking in the air.


• Potential target for thieves
  With a desktop, it is difficult to pick it up and carry it away without being noticed. Whereas with laptops, it is easy. In fact too easy. For a thief to pickup your laptop and walk away with it, probably wouldn't take more than 3 seconds before it disappear from sight. Time and time again I have noticed people being a little too careless about their laptops, leaving them lying around even if for a minute or so. Most of us have confidential information in our laptops. And if the laptop gets stolen, just imagine the agony and trouble we have to go through. Sometimes even with all the precaution we take, there is still a possibility they can get stolen. Therefore to prevent the thief from getting access to your data, I would recommend that in addition to the Windows XP password, you set the boot-up password as well, which requires you to enter the password each time you switch on your laptop. Yes. it is a pain to have to key in your password every time you start your computer. But it will be a bigger pain if it gets stolen.


• Back up regularly
  This will not prevent your laptop from being stolen or improve your security, but if anything should happen, you will be real glad that you have a recent back up. Even though laptop hard drive are more resilient these days, but with mobility also comes hard knocks. In the event that the hard drive experience hardware problem, it could render the data unreadable. So I will re-emphasize, back up regularly.