Top Tips for your Notebook

Discipline when on the move

The only protection against being careless is more care and discipline – but that is difficult when you are under time pressure. A survey of the lost and found offices in the German cities of Berlin, Frankfurt, Hamburg, and Munich found that more than 25 notebooks were turned in to them in the first half of 2004 alone. This might sound obvious, but if you travel with a notebook, you should always make sure that you really have the notebook case, including all of its contents, over your shoulder before you leave the plane, taxi, or train.

Making passwords more difficult to crack

If the worst happens and your computer is stolen or lost, there is still hope that your personal data is not accessible if the password is difficult to crack. A mixture of, numbers, letters, and symbols is considered the most secure – but only if passwords and keys are not stored on the hard disk. For this reason it is better if the computer prompts for a password before booting – electronic security solutions enable this. This makes it very difficult for an unauthorized user to access the operating system or saved data.

Supplement password protection

Analysts working for the Meta Group have confirmed what IT managers already know: passwords alone do not provide optimum protection for data. The alternatives have been available, and in use, for years: special smartcards or tokens – which look just like a USB stick – store key information that is used in combination with a user password to unlock the computer. Only someone who has the token and knows the password can access the system and the data saved on it.

A variant becoming more common and which is a bit more expensive is to store the user’s biometric data on a smartcard. For authentication, the user’s fingerprint is checked directly on the card instead of using a password.

Secure standby mode

You can set up the system to prompt for the password again when the notebook switches back from screen saver or hibernation mode to normal working mode. This means your data is still secure if you stop for a break or you are making a phone call in the train or airport.

Set up an electronic safe

Much like keeping important papers in safes, you should never save valuable information without protecting it electronically: The electronic pendant is a “virtual” disk drive that securely encrypts and stores all of its contents. You can easily set up an electronic safe of this kind on local hard disks and network directories, on PDAs, and on mobile media such as USB sticks and flash memory cards, CD-ROMs, DVDs, and diskettes to provide secure storage of your electronic data.

Implement automatic encryption

What use is the best safe, if the valuable data is simply left on the shelf next to it because no one takes the time to think about whether a particular document needs protecting at all? Here, transparent data encryption is a big help: It runs automatically in the background, without being noticed, so the user does not even have to think about storing data securely.

Restrict plug and play

Plug and Play is convenient, but it can sometimes be dangerous: if someone connects a USB stick, MP3 player, or external hard disk drive to a notebook, it is recognized automatically – and it is then easy to start exporting data and passing it on to the wrong people. The alternative is to lock the computer, so all memory media except for the company's own memory sticks cannot be used to run or read programs. This also removes the danger of accidentally loading a worm or virus on your own hard disk if you lend the data medium to someone and get it back with a "dangerous cargo." In addition, you should only use sensitive data on USB sticks when it is encrypted, as the smaller the memory device, the greater the danger that it will get lost or stolen.