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Why Your Laptop Needs An “Instant Kill” Switch

It’s lunch time and you stop by your favorite café to check e-mail and grab a bite to eat. You settle in at a table when your pickup number is called. Returning to your table, you find your laptop and appetite—has disappeared!
Okay, maybe you’re not foolish enough to leave your laptop unattended in a public place, but one of your employees might think it’s okay to leave a laptop or PDA in their car, a hotel room, or in their gym bag and end up exposing your company’s data and network to thieves.
If it hasn’t happened to you or someone you know, according to the FBI, it will. Maybe you have a backup of the data, but now detailed information about you, your family, your business and your clients is in the hands of a criminal intent on stealing your money, identity or worse. There is a lot of software and hardware that protects your data from being stolen by online criminals, but how do you protect your data when someone steals your physical laptop or PDA?
Until now, your only recourse was to change the passwords to your network, financial websites, etc., watch your credit report and cross your fingers hoping for the best. But thanks to new security software, you can instantly erase all of the data on your laptop or PDA preventing thieves from accessing the data.
Here’s how it works: Special security software is installed on your laptop that checks for your “kill” command whenever it connects to the Internet. This happens even before Windows prompts for the user name and password. If it receives the “kill” message, the data on your computer is instantly destroyed. You may not get your laptop back, but you’ll prevent the thief from stealing the information it contains.
If you’re a business, check out Absolute Software’s Computrace and Novell’s ZENworks. Both should be installed and configured by your system administrator or a computer consultant. If you want to protect your home computer or personal laptop, use zTrace’s zControl. Although designed for the general public, it can be confusing to install and configure so seek the help of a professional.
In the PDA world, there’s remoteProtect from sCPsOFT for Windows CE, Windows Mobile and Pocket PC devices or Bluefish’s Central for the Palm Treo. If your PDA is stolen, you simply text a message to it that includes your password and the PDA is reset it to its blank factory default condition. What could be easier?
As with all theft and hacker deterrents, thieves can circumvent this software by downloading your data before connecting the device to the Internet. Surprisingly, the typical thief isn’t smart enough to know this. So, for absolute security, data encryption remains the most reliable form of protection. Encrypted data is unreadable to thieves unless they have your encryption key. There are pros and cons to both approaches, but it’s important for you to have SOME protection. For help in determining the best solution for you, give us a call: 985-871-0333.
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