One of the most significant risks for charter schools is losing or stealing data through employees’ laptops. Last discussed five items that will help prevent your data from being stolen. This week, we want to present the remaining five items.
6. Protect yourself from other users
For additional protection against malicious users connected to the same business center or hotel network, connect your laptop to a travel router plugging into an Ethernet jack.
A travel router acts as a highly effective hardware firewall, helping keep your computer isolated from other users on the network. (Most computers have a software firewall installed but can turn off viruses, and other malicious software can turn these off.)
7. Check for known vulnerabilities
When you connect your laptop to the Internet when traveling, you may not be protected by any security systems your company uses to filter out malicious emails or to keep you from malicious websites. That could result in hackers exploiting vulnerabilities in the software on your computer to infect it with malware.
To reduce the chances of this, it is essential to check that your computer’s operating system and other software have been updated with the latest security patches.
8. Don’t lose it in the airport rush
According to research by the Ponemon Institute, tens of thousands of laptops are lost in airports every week, and only about one-third are ever returned to their owners.
Attaching a proximity alarm to your laptop bag is one way to avoid leaving your laptop behind when you go through security or get called for your flight.
These inexpensive devices alert your smartphone if they detect that they have moved more than a few feet away from you.
9. Keep your USB sticks secure
If you carry a USB memory stick to make backups of your work or store other data, it’s important to make sure that the data on it is as secure as the data on your laptop.
You can encrypt a memory stick the same way you would a computer hard drive. Once created, the memory stick can only be accessed after supplying a password.
An alternative is to use a USB drive with encryption hardware and other security features built in, available from companies like IronKey. These secure USB drives self-destruct if the wrong password is supplied 10 times in a row, making it all but impossible for a thief to access the data they hold by repeatedly guessing the password.
10. Lock It Up
Perhaps the most prominent piece of advice, frequently ignored, is making it hard for an opportunistic thief to walk off with your laptop.
One way to do this is to use a Kensington lock—a metal cable that you can loop around a suitable fixed object and that attaches to any laptop equipped with a Kensington slot.
Kensington locks certainly don’t provide total security, as the cables can be cut or ripped out of the laptop, but it is enough to make many thieves move on to easier pickings.
