How to Minimize the Impact of Laptop Theft
Three steps that can reduce your risk of confidential data loss and streamline remediation in the event of laptop theft or loss.
- Well-defined policies that govern the way confidential data is accessed, managed and transported
- Extended security policies to include business partners, vendors, outsourcers and consultants
- Periodic risk assessments to identify areas of risk and quantify the impact of potential breaches
- Employee awareness and education, which includes communication of penalties for employee noncompliance, workforce training in basic security techniques and real-time alerts that inform employees as soon as a policy is compromised
- Encryption technologies that secure confidential data on laptops and make access nearly impossible without the appropriate credentials
- Physical security solutions such as key fobs and biometric finger scanners that create additional layers of protection
- Data loss prevention software that discovers exposed confidential data on laptops and protects the data itself by automatically enforcing policies through quarantine and encryption
- Thorough response and recovery procedures to determine severity and escalation and include such good faith gestures as paying for a year of credit- and fraud-monitoring services for affected customers.
A second critical step to mitigate your risk is to proactively reduce the amount of confidential data on the laptops in your organization. Until recently, this action would have required continuous worker education by the organization so that each employee was cognizant of data security policies and exercised constant vigilance so as never to leave unsecured data on their hard drives. But even for the most attentive employees, the form of self-managed policy is simply not an effective method of risk reduction.
Technologies such as data loss prevention solutions are used to scan desktops, laptops and servers to identify unsecured confidential data—including customer information and intellectual property. Then they can automatically quarantine or relocate the information according to policy to reduce the amount of confidential information exposed to loss or theft.
Many organizations have turned to full disk encryption as a preventive measure. While encryption is a key technology to safeguard mobile data, the challenge is how to prioritize laptops for encryption. Without prioritization, encryption efforts would not be focused on the highest risk machines and would be extremely time consuming to implement. Organizations need to first build a prioritization queue based on insight into exactly where the most confidential data is stored. This can be done through a scan to tell you which laptops have the highest amount of confidential data so encryption can be applied to these machines first.
Step 3: Quickly Scope the Impact of Exposed Confidential Data and Accurately Assess Risk
One of the biggest challenges information security teams face is how to quickly and accurately determine what confidential data resides on a missing or stolen laptop. The unscientific approach usually involves numerous employee interviews, searches of e-mail and backup archives, manual reconstruction and speculative forensic analysis of what was potentially lost on the laptop. The process is largely manual, can take days or weeks and, in the end, delivers uncertain results.
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