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Holiday travel without data leaks

December 13, 2011 by bkrenek

The winter holidays are upon us and that means the travel season is pivoting into high gear.  Employees everywhere are preparing to trot off hither and yon, likely with their laptops and mobile devices in tow – and, accordingly, with your company’s data, as enticing to prowling cyber-thieves as overstuffed Christmas stockings.  While holiday travelers unwind and turn their focus to hearth and family, fraudsters focus on snatching precious data from unwary targets at airports, wi-fi hotspots, hotels and beyond.

What can companies do to mitigate the risk to their holiday-traveling data?

First, remind employees about the importance of protecting their laptops and other data-carrying devices. According to the Ponemon Institute, close to 637,000 laptops are lost each year, most commonly at security checkpoints.  Ponemon notes that 10,278 laptops are reported lost every week at 36 of the largest U.S. airports, and 65 percent of those laptops are not reclaimed.  The airports with the highest number of lost, missing or stolen laptops include (in this order) Los Angeles International, Miami International, Kennedy International, and Chicago O’Hare.  While Atlanta’s Hartsfield-Jackson International is the busiest airport in the U.S., it is tied for eighth place (with Washington’s Reagan National) for lost, stolen or missing laptop computers.

The average value of a lost laptop is $49,246, a number based on several factors: replacement cost, detection, forensics, data breach, lost intellectual property costs, lost productivity and legal, consulting and regulatory expenses.  Given the damage associated with laptops that go MIA, it might be wise to restrict access to corporate information while employees are traveling.  If full access to server information isn’t needed, consider using other systems such as read-only export files.  Suggest that employees transfer sensitive data from laptops to your company’s secure central server, or move it to a disk that may be stored safely until they return.  And don’t forget that encryption can serve as an endpoint protection, which allows employees to perform a remote data erase if a device is lost.

A few other tips:

  • Encourage the use of privacy filters, which block the ability to view computer screens from an angle.
  • Guard against open wi-fi prowlers by setting computer defaults to require owners’ authority before connecting to a new network.
  • Discourage the use of public computers.  Many of them contain “keylogger spyware” that can monitor every keystroke.