‘Laptop Theft’ Articles

Laptop theft and mobile data theft (tape backups, iPhones, BlackBerries, USB drives) account for nearly half of the cases of serious corporate data breach and workplace identity theft. Your corporation’s data breach protection will be significantly improved by educating your staff on the following mobile data best practices:

Before you save sensitive data to any mobile device, it is your responsibility to:

• Determine if your organization allows you to remove the data in question from the office in the first place. Are you allowed to save that database, Excel file, Word document, customer list, employee record, intellectual capital, etc. on your laptop, thumb drive or other mobile device?
• Decide if it is absolutely necessary to remove it from the more highly-controlled and secure environment of the office. In many of the major cases of reported data breach, the data stored on the mobile device did not actually need to be there in the first place.
• Verify that you have been authorized by your supervisor to place a copy on your device. When in doubt, check with your manager, supervisor or privacy officer to determine the correct course of action.
• Exhaust all other lower-risk alternatives for accessing the data. In many cases, it is possible to utilize a secure remote access connection to access the data so that it never leaves the company premises. You lower your personal liability when you access the data through centralized, highly secure methods.

I just finished speaking to an amazing group of financial advisors at the Lincoln Financial Group Planning Forum. This is a group of people who take the security of their business information, the privacy of their clients and their own personal data safety very seriously. It was an identity theft prevention speech, but specifically geared to the exceptional amount of identity handled by financial planners. These are people who have to proactively protect physical client files, filing cabinets, computers access, wired and wireless networks, trash, mail, hiring policies (to avoid bringing an identity thief into the company), mobile devices, and many other forms of information vulnerability as part of their everyday job. That is a lot of responsibility, and this group handles it beautifully. But I gave them some advice that turned out to be suspect…