Rip of the Week: 1,700 School District Employees Breached

In a cookie-cutter breach incident with all the normal characteristics, the Francis Howell School District is warning employees that a laptop computer theft could have compromised personal information.
Thanks much to Redemtech for the summary on this one.
The laptop was “password protected” according to the district, and thus “it is unlikely the information has been accessed.” [...]

Tip of the Week: Don’t Forget the 250 GB Thumbnail

Moore’s Law has been around since roughly 1965, essentially stating that computing power doubles every two years. There are some caveats to that, but that’s the basic idea. And, we all know it to be true, as memory capacities continue to skyrocket and processors get faster (or we get more of them in parallel). Whether [...]

Rip of the Week: Laptop Theft in Broad Daylight Caught on Video

Here’s video surveillance footage of an actual laptop theft. This theft happens to include just about every attribute we talk about regularly here at MyLaptopGPS.
First, watch the footage:

What we notice here is important.

At 16:09:39 the thief enters the restaurant.
He waits 25 minutes. According to the restaurant owner, he even ordered some food.
At 16:34:20 he prepares [...]

Tip of the Week: Avoid Distraction in Public

One of the chief causes of laptop loss, as opposed to theft, is distraction.
You’re on a phone call (probably without Bluetooth handsfree capability) and you jump out of the cab to sprint into the building for your meeting (10 minutes late). Your laptop is left right in the back seat.
You’re hustling through security at the [...]

Rip of the Week: Foolish Laptop Thief Unwittingly Dooms Himself

It’s well known that, quite often, catching a thief doesn’t mean solving a theft. It often means solving a whole bunch of thefts. Most thieves don’t just steal a laptop. They steal ten laptops, five iPhones, and a partridge in a pear tree.
As many times as thieves get away with what they do, we can [...]

Tip of the Week: Record Serial Numbers

I was visiting with a high-ranking official in a Denver, Colorado metro area police department. We were talking about laptop theft, and he told me a story that he said is all too common.
The police pull over a suspect, probably for a routine traffic violation. In the suspect’s trunk are five laptops, six iPhones, and [...]

Rip of the Week: LAX Travelers Lose a Laptop Every 8.4 Minutes

In the Tip of the Week column I’d previously noted the insecurity of airports, with the Ponemon Institute’s study revealing 12,000 laptops per week lost or stolen in US airports alone. For the Rip of the Week I will actually include 1,200. That is, 1,200 thefts (and losses) per week in one single airport.
LA Weekly [...]

Tip of the Week: There is No Silver Bullet

When it comes to effective data security, there is perhaps one absolutely Golden Rule: there is no silver bullet.
Some security protocols, measures, technology, algorithms, methods and ideas are much stronger than others. Some are more comprehensive. Some are less vulnerable. Some are more easily implemented.
But one thing remains true, and that is that absolutely no [...]