10 Tips to Keep Your Notebook Safe when Traveling ~ Chris Pirillo

Link: 10 Tips to Keep Your Notebook Safe when Traveling ~ Chris Pirillo. Lawyers are just as mobile as other professionals. Traveling nowadays demands a laptop computer; and, like other professionals, we carry our lives on these little machines. Other than strapping the computer to your rear end, and carrying it EVERYWHERE, what else can you do to protect it, and your data, on the road? Chris Pirillo has ten ideas; some of which you have read about in this space before. Tops on the Futurelawyer list? Backup, backup, backup. Always have an image of your hard drive, made recently, and especially when you travel. Other tips? Check out Chris' excellent article. By the way, one tip that Chris doesn't mention; but, I find most important...get a SMALL ultralight notebook for travel, like less than 3 pounds. Any larger, and you won't want to carry it with you.

Comments

[Adam P.]

I especially like his suggestion to leave it at home. Seems out of place in an article on how to take your computer with you.

I've done quite a bit of research in this department and I'd like to offer some additional information:

Mac users with iSight can setup the computer so it automatically takes photos of the user sitting in front of the screen on invalid login attempts, and then emails those pictures to a specified email. I'm not a Mac user so I cant go into too much detail, but a quick google search will give you all you need.

I'm a PC user, and I have successfully Lo-Jacked my PC. Here's what I've done:

1. I changed my bios to only boot from hard drive. This setting prevents someone from sticking a CD or USB into the computer and trying to do a fresh install of a new operating system bypassing my security.

2. I password protected my bios. This only reinforces my settings from 1. The bios can be reset, but not by the ordinary computer user or small-time thief.

3. I set my computer to automatically login. This may seem counterintuitive, why would I want to HELP the theif login to my computer? I have several reasons, but I'll give two. First, a successful login is essential to step 4. Second, if the thief can login, the chances are better he'll try to sell it or at least keep it instead of trashing the computer and ruining any chance I had at recovery.

4. This step really pulls the others together. I've installed LocatePC. LocatePC is a small program that sends the user an email with the computer's current IP address every time the computer is booted up. Essentially, my laptop "calls home" every time I turn it on. A quick search of the IP will reveal the location, service provider and other useful information.

So here's how I EXPECT this to play out. The thief takes my computer. He gets it home and decides to check out his loot. Maybe he's paranoid, or he's done this before, so he tries to do a fresh install to erase whatever is currently on the computer. To his suprise the computer skips right past starting from CD or USB and goes straight to Windows. Now the thief probably thinks he'll just take a shot at cracking the password, but SUPRISE, no password is required and he's automatically logged into Windows. The thief thinks to himself, "this is too easy". MAYBE a super-sophisticated thief looks for a program that might tattle on him and give away his location, but since LocatePC works in the background, he's none the wiser. Meanwhile, I check my email and find the message with his IP. I do a quick google search and me and the fuzz are at his door in no time. It isnt fullproof, but it is VERY close.