Prevention
Lockdown Your Laptop
By Michelle Hainer
As a freelance writer
in Brooklyn, N.Y., Meredith Blake’s laptop is her lifeline. That
is, until it was lifted from her luggage on a recent trip. Along with
Blake’s utter disbelief that she had been a theft victim came the
sinking realization that an enormous amount of personal information
had been on her computer: invoices, tax returns, pictures and music
-- all retrievable to a tech-savvy thief.
“It was like my
eyeballs couldn’t process the void in my bag,” says Blake, who
had bought the laptop in November and hadn’t even finished paying
it off yet. “I was like ‘Are you kidding me?’”
Sadly, Blake’s
computer and data were truly gone. And while laptops can be replaced,
the information you keep on them may wind up in the wrong hands,
which brings on a whole new set of worries. Luckily, the following
steps can help you secure your laptop when you are on the go and also
protect your files and information should it get stolen or lost.
Step
No. 1: Lock
your laptop
While it goes
without saying that you should never leave your laptop unattended, it
doesn’t hurt to literally lock it down, too. The Targus DEFCON
computer cable lock allows you to bolt your laptop to wherever you’re
sitting, making it much more difficult for a crook to carry it away.
Step
No. 2: Back
up your info
“More and more
irreplaceable items -- photos, financial documents, checkbooks -- are
being stored on computers,” says George Symons, CEO of Yosemite
Technologies, a data protection software company in Sunnyvale, Calif.
“But make sure that info isn’t only on your laptop.”
Symons
recommends investing in an external hard drive or USB drive, where
you can store pictures, music files and documents. Either of these
hard drives, which are often inexpensive and small in size, plug into
your computer’s USB or Firewire ports, allowing you to manually
copy files onto them. You can also buy a software program like
Yosemite Filekeeper Pro, which automatically copies any new file on
your computer. Symons also suggests web-based archive services like
Apple iDisk, X-drive, Carbonite or Mozy, which allow you to store
pictures, music, documents and more for a monthly or annual fee. If
your laptop is stolen, your files can be reloaded onto your new
computer.
Step
No. 3: Invest in encryption software
If a thief does take
off with your laptop, a great way to make the information on it
unreadable is to scramble it through a process called encryption.
Sounds complicated right? Luckily, if you have a PC, you can purchase
software like HandyCrypto or FineCrypt, which will automatically
encrypt your documents, making them readable only to those who have
the keycode. On a Mac, you can use a preloaded application called
FileVault to protect your goods.
Keeping your laptop
password protected (using a passkey that contains at least eight
characters and a mixture of letters and numbers) is also a good idea,
though this won’t necessarily protect your data, says Symons. Often
times, thieves remove a laptop’s hard disk and plug it into another
computer, which can render your passwords invalid and give them
access to your data.
Since Blake’s
laptop was taken, a friend offered to give her her old one, which was
a tremendous help. And she’ll no doubt use more security measures
in the future. Though still shaken by the experience, she can at
least put it into perspective: “It would have been more devastating
if I had been working on a novel, and it was saved on my computer,”
she says.
