Mobile Security

According to Gartner analyst John Girard, the most common places for laptop thefts are airport security checkpoints, hotel restrooms, meeting rooms, and registration lines. Girard recommends these top-tips for keeping machines safe:

• Keep your laptop in sight while going through security checkpoints.
• Always have the laptop in carry-on luggage
• Tape a business card to the laptop
• Avoid leaving your laptop in hotel baggage-hold rooms
• Lock the laptop or removable hard drive, if equipped, in a secure place when it's not in use

These tips are helpful but looking back at some past cases shows that there are no hard and fast rules of when laptop thieves are likely to take a chance:

• The government minister in charge of Britain's nuclear secrets had his laptop stolen from his house in 2000. Armed forces minister John Spellar had his home broken into in Bromley, Kent. The intruder stole his laptop computer but left without touching two red boxes containing potentially sensitive defence information.
• An MI6 officer left his laptop in a taxi after a night's drinking in a tapas bar in Vauxhall, south London, while an MI5 officer had his stolen when he put it down to buy a ticket at a station.
• A science laboratory cleaner from Didcot, near Oxford, was recently convicted of stealing laptops from her employer by hiding them up her jumper. The woman managed to steal six machines this way before anyone noticed something was up.
• The chief executive of Qualcomm had his notebook stolen from the podium of hotel conference room where he had just finished giving a talk to the Society of American Business Editors and Writers. He had been talking with several members of the press only 30 feet away when he noticed the machine was missing.

Usually the thief is interested in the laptop not the information on it. Encouragingly, surveys show that only 10 to 15 percent of laptops are stolen by criminals intent on selling the data, according to Gartner analyst William Malik.

But the fact that the thieves didn't set out to steal information is no consolation if there are vital files on the machine that haven't been backed up. A doctor lost his lifetime of research earlier this year, when his laptop was stolen from a hospital in Leicester. The research was on children with holes in their hearts and unfortunately no back-up copy had been made. The theft follows a similar case last year, when another machine, also containing essential research, was stolen from the Royal Hospital for Sick Children in Edinburgh. The machine was eventually recovered, to the relief of the doctor concerned.

Yet despite the ludicrously high numbers of notebooks that go missing, companies are not doing nearly enough to secure their machines. Nearly two-thirds of UK business users do not use a password when they log-on to their PCs or laptops, according to Mori survey commissioned by Compaq. Of the people who do use passwords, 15 percent use their own name and 10 percent give password details to colleagues. A third of respondents have not changed their passwords in the past year.

The poll also revealed that around half of those surveyed believed their laptop was susceptible to theft, yet more than a third did not make copies of confidential files. But backing up data shouldn't be such an issue. Apple's iDisk service allows files to be copied and stored online, while US firm Connected offers a similar service for PC's.

Other security measures available include encryption and tracking devices. Thales e-security launched a hard-drive encryption device in April this year that protects laptop data by storing everything on the machine's hard drive in an encrypted state. The Guardisk device has been approved by the Government's Communications Electronic Security Group (CESG) for restricted, and in some cases Top Secret, data, and introduced to some departments.

On the tracking side, software from companies such as Absolute Software and zTrace Technologies offer technology similar to the tracking devices now installed in some cars. Absolute's ComputracePlus application silently connects with the company's monitoring centre whenever the device is connected to the Internet. If the notebook is reported stolen or lost, its location is tracked and the police are called to recover the machine.