Guide to portable computer security protection

If you have been on a trip for a while, you may experience this kind of pain. When you get on the plane, you find that you forget an important baggage. If this luggage is your laptop, you may want to embark on a fantastic journey to Hawaii without going back to work. You may be able to direct your company's important intellectual property rights to your competitors. As knowledge workers become increasingly active and indispensable computing and knowledge management tools become more and more powerful, the ever-expanding volumes of data on portable computers are flowing around, and the data is almost unprotected! A large amount of source code, financial data, company strategy, and other information may be stored on the hard disk of a portable computer. In addition, it took several days to collect music! When the portable computer leaves the company's traditional security scope, the data will become insecure. If you do not provide adequate protection for the data on your mobile computer, it means inviting the public to access your company network.
Protect your File System
The file system on your computer controls how data and files are stored on disks and how access to these items is controlled. Windows XP and Windows 2000 provide you with a variety of options for formatting your hard disk with a file system. Professional FAT and FAT32 are provided for traditional compatibility and upgrade compatibility because they are standard file systems for Windows 95/98/Millenium. NTFS provides many popular improvements, including access control, allowing you to specify which users can access which files. Access Control Lists (ACL) of NTFS allows you to grant or deny specific users and groups the permission to Access certain files and folders as needed, you can grant individual users the permission to read, write, or fully control specific files or folders containing files. By default, permissions are hierarchical, and each folder inherits the permissions from the previous layer to the root drive.
If you do not use NTFS on your laptop, follow these instructions to convert your disk to NTFS.
Protect your laptop from theft
In a conspicuous situation: If you strictly control your portable computer physically, it is not easy to be stolen. The example is as follows:
· Use cable locks. Although cable locks will increase the burden on travel, it will make people who like to easily start in hotels and workplaces. As long as you find something that can safely lock your laptop on it, you don't have to worry about losing it when you leave for lunch, you don't have to rush to the hotel after dinner. No matter when you leave your laptop and no one will take care of it, you must lock it.
· Do not leave your laptop unattended. For example, when you pass the airport security check, they will ask you to put the portable computer on the conveyor belt through the X-ray scanner. Please stand behind the machine and wait for your computer to come out, in this way, there will be no such situation as someone else takes your laptop away and you will catch up with it.
· Mark all computer components. This may not block real thieves, but helps you retrieve batteries, port replicas, or other parts that you accidentally lose.
| Disable automatic logon.
Of course, if your laptop account can automatically log on and people can freely access the data, why should they take it away? Both Windows 2000 and Windows XP provide you with the option to enable the operating system to log on automatically with the specified user creden。 at startup. Although this provides great convenience, it makes it easy for unauthorized users to access your data. At home, automatic login is not always a bad choice, but if you travel with the company's important information, it is an unwise choice.
To disable automatic logon in Windows XP:
1. Click start and then click Run ".
2. In the open text box, type control userpasswords2.
3. When this dialog box appears, make sure that you have to enter the user name and password to use this computer option to be selected.
4. Click OK ".
Encrypt Key Files
Passwords and NTFS ACLs are helpful to prevent hackers from intruding into your system. However, unfortunately, for users who travel a lot, hackers can access the machine entities without restriction, and they will eventually find a way to crack the hard disk. (Remember, if a bad person can access your computer without restriction, it will no longer be yours .) When you are at the airport, you may think that one day, when you fly home, your laptop may not be with you. In addition to spending a sum of money to purchase a laptop, you may have handed over important data (or personal information, this loss is far greater than the hardware overhead.
The Encrypting File System (EFS) running on NTFS allows you to encrypt the selected files and folders on the hard disk, making it difficult for malicious users to decrypt them. EFS best practices stipulate that you should encrypt folders instead of files to ensure that data written to temporary files is also encrypted when using data.
Of course, not all things on the hard disk need encryption. You can choose encrypted content based on its value. When many people use the "My Documents" folder as a temporary folder for their information, EFS best practices also recommend that you encrypt this folder.
| Disable automatic logon.
　　
Of course, if your laptop account can automatically log on and people can freely access the data, why should they take it away? Both Windows 2000 and Windows XP provide you with the option to enable the operating system to log on automatically with the specified user creden。 at startup. Although this provides great convenience, it makes it easy for unauthorized users to access your data. At home, automatic login is not always a bad choice, but if you travel with the company's important information, it is an unwise choice.
To disable automatic logon in Windows XP:
1. Click start and then click Run ".
2. In the open text box, type control userpasswords2.
3. When this dialog box appears, make sure that you have to enter the user name and password to use this computer option to be selected.
4. Click OK ".
Encrypt Key Files
Passwords and NTFS ACLs are helpful to prevent hackers from intruding into your system. However, unfortunately, for users who travel a lot, hackers can access the machine entities without restriction, and they will eventually find a way to crack the hard disk. (Remember, if a bad person can access your computer without restriction, it will no longer be yours .) When you are at the airport, you may think that one day, when you fly home, your laptop may not be with you. In addition to spending a sum of money to purchase a laptop, you may have handed over important data (or personal information, this loss is far greater than the hardware overhead.
The Encrypting File System (EFS) running on NTFS allows you to encrypt the selected files and folders on the hard disk, making it difficult for malicious users to decrypt them. EFS best practices stipulate that you should encrypt folders instead of files to ensure that data written to temporary files is also encrypted when using data.
Of course, not all things on the hard disk need encryption. You can choose encrypted content based on its value. When many people use the "My Documents" folder as a temporary folder for their information, EFS best practices also recommend that you encrypt this folder.