Lessons I Learned When My Laptop Was Stolen [Laptops]

A month ago, developer Nikhil Kodilkar’s laptop was stolen. He had several safety features in place, but he also learned an awful lot from the experience. Listed below are several of his more important takeaways.

Image by Florian

Let’s go over a ” What if” condition. As we speak, what if some stranger had access on your personal laptop and was going over everything you’ve got on the hard disk?

The thought alone is enough to send chills through my spine. Now replace laptop with ” Backup storage” or ” Desktop” -whatever it’s you utilize regularly-to get the specified effect.

Recently my house was broken into, and along side other valuables, they took my beloved ThinkPad . (Yes, I admire those plain black no-nonsense machines.)

My laptop was filled with personal & important information. It’s been almost a month since it was stolen, and it still drives me crazy fascinated by it. But enough rambling; let me get you to the meat of the story:

Lessons

As most of you, my laptop didn’t have any harddisk encryption. The only real safety it had was my password and fortuitously fingerprint scanner. That’s one reason I am keen on ThinkPads. You may have a beautiful long and sophisticated password, but mutually have fingerprint authentication. Hence whenever you wish to login for your computer, you only swipe your finger and you might be in. Anyone who wants to breakin to the computer has an uphill battle.

Coming back to encryption, I have to have had atleast a totally rudimentary encryption enabled, so that even though someone gets in, they must have basic skills to get on your data.

You have plenty of options you could employ to keep your data safer, and I would like to get this out, so all my friends can implement them. Listed below are several:

1. Hide your individual folders

I know, this sounds extremely lame, especially for all who have grown up with computers, but you may be surprised with what percentage people don’t understand how to ” unhide” a folder. I’m talking about PCs here. The person that stole your computer might not even be skilled enough to search out your hidden folders. It’s not an entire-proof is the minimum! I’m kicking myself for not doing even this.

2. Truecrypt

Did you know that there is a free encryption program available on the net, that you may use to encrypt a component or whole of your harddrive or your backup USB drive ?

Well neither did I.

I started looking into it after the breakin and discovered Truecrypt . Go over this step-by-step process to create a secure directory in your harddrive that’s encrypted and private only to you.

For geeks like me who need to get into the main points of everything, there is this nice comparison of features .

Ed. note: Take a look at our guide to encrypting all of your operating system for seriously heavy-duty encryption.

If you’re going to buy a new laptop, you’ve two more options: Hardware encryption and Bitlocker. Bitlocker only comes with Windows 7 Ultimate .

3. Use an encrypted hard disk

There is a saying: ” Once your tongue is burnt by hot milk, you’ll make certain butter milk is cold” . (Sorry for the ghastly translation, but I suppose you get the gist-butter milk is rarely served hot.)

The point is, I wasn’t satisfied with software encryption, and wanted to get something:
a.) More robust
b.) More unobtrusive
c.) Better performance

Since I was buying a new laptop, I needed to peer if I may fine person who would include hardware encryption, something built into the system. Self encrypting drives (SED), a.k.a. Full Encrypted Disks (FED-Seagate) were my answer.

In FEDs, the encryption key exists in the hard disk drive controller itself and is absolutely not exposed on your computer, operating system, or perhaps you. The secret’s stored by the controller on the hard disk at a secret location. Also, encryption can’t be disabled from them. The subsequent logical question is: How on the planet do I access my own files if I don’t have the encryption key? It is advisable to enable a troublesome drive password, one who is stored within the BIOS.

FEDs solved a very important concern of mine. a good number of HDDs have passwords so you may’t boot from them. However, stick the HDD as a secondary on a separate computer, and boom, you could have access to all its data. On the subject of FED, in the event you stick the drive as secondary, all you notice is 256 AES encrypted data which you can not read. And in the event you attempt to boot from it, you want a difficult drive password. Or, within the ThinkPad’s case, it’s essential to swipe your finger.

This is nice enough for the typical, non-CIA, non-FBI, non-SPY variety of people, identical to you and me.

4. Which laptops have FEDs?

I was hunting for laptops with FEDs and again the ThinkPad came to the rescue. Although I really like HP laptops , none of them come with FEDs. Dell has an Inspiron with encryption drives, but ThinkPad has so much more value to your money.

You also give you the chance to buy a FED from Seagate and put it into your laptop. The problem with that (or what I’ve learned from the Seagate forums) is that if you are going to buy and configure a FED by yourself, the hard disk is married in your motherboard. This implies you can not take that drive and stick it into another laptop. With a Thinkpad, you may.

5. Let’s catch a thief

Think like a thief to catch a thief, right? That could be easier said than done, that is why I bought Lojack . Lojack is software that may help track track a lost or stolen computer.

Ed. note: For a free alternative, you can also would like to look at the way to track your stolen laptop with Prey .

Take a lesson from me, my friends: When you’ve got your laptop with you, use a minimum of Truecrypt and something like Lojack.

Source

This post is tagged: fingerprint authentication, fingerprint scanner, harddisk encryption, important information, safety features, sophisticated password