Protect Your Laptop


Be Aware of Thieves

Traveling with a laptop is risky business. Since state-of-the-art digital equipment is in great demand, laptops (and digital cameras) can disappear faster than you would believejust take your eyes off your computer bag for a split second in an airport or Internet cafe and it could be gone. Be extra careful in big, busy Internet cafes in big cities. Professional thieves know that tourists usually put their bags down on the floor while they send email back home.

  • Use a plain bag or backpack that doesn't call attention to itself as a super cool package that probably contains really expensive digital toys. A specially designed computer case is nice, but it's also a big red flag for professional thieves who would like to score big and go home early.

  • When you're relaxing in an airport or restaurant, always keep your computer bag strap wrapped around an arm or leg. Professional thieves hang out at places like this just waiting for you to be distracted.

  • When you visit an Internet cafe, never set your bag down next to your chair while you excitedly compose an email to your pals back home. By the time you type "Hi everyone, we're at a really cool Internet Cafe in London," your bag of digital hardware might be across the street and on its way to a lucky new owner. As Robin can tell you from personal experience, when you go to the nearest police station to report the theft, an un-surprised officr will say something like, "We get a dozen complaints a day from that cafe, miss."

  • When going through security at an airport, keep an eye on your bag as it passes through the metal detector and comes off the conveyor belt. A theft can occur if a thief is several people ahead of you in line with an accomplice who's just in front of you and holds up the line by setting off the metal detector.

  • Always take your computer on an airplane as a carry-on item. Checked luggage is more likely to get tossed around, banged up, lost, or stolen.

  • Keep a copy of your computer make, model, and serial number in case you need to file a police report.

  • Put an identification label on your computer bag or on the computer. Sometimes laptops are just misplaced instead of stolen.

Theft Alarms

One way to help protect your laptop is to use a wireless proximity alarm. These alarms usually consist of two pieces, a small transmitter that you put in your computer bag and a small receiver that you keep in your pocket or on a keychain. When the two devices are separated by more than the preset distance (around 15 feet), a loud alarm goes off. Other alarm types detect any motion of the computer and cause your keychain device to make a chirping sound. You can remotely set off the alarm if your laptop is being stolen.

To find wireless laptop alarms, search the web for "laptop theft alarms" or "laptop security systems" to find a variety of devices.

Track Down a Stolen Laptop

As another safeguard, you can buy and install tracking software that includes a tracking service. If your laptop gets stolen, the happy new owner will probably use it to connect to the Internet. Any time your laptop connects to a phone line or the Internet, a distress signal is sent to the tracking service. This information provides the information necessary to locate the phone number and/or IP address being used by your missing computer. The tracking service works with local authorities, ISPs, and telephone companies to locate the computer. Some services even provide the ability to delete sensitive files remotely from the missing laptop.

A good place to start your search for laptop tracking services is StealthSignal's xTool Computer Tracker (www.StealthSignal.com). To find other options, search the web for "laptop tracking software."

What if a nice person finds your laptop and wants to return it? Make sure you have an identification label on the computer or computer bag with a local phone number or cell phone (not your home address), and hope that someone honest will call. Good luck.


Disable Automatic Login

Do you enter a password when you open your laptop and start up? If you're traveling with that laptop, you should. Your Mac doesn't ask for a password when you've got "automatic login" turned on. And if there's no password, then anyone who steals your Mac has access to everything on it.

As the Administrator of the laptop, you can turn off automatic login for all users, whether or not you know their passwords. See page 151.


To turn off the automatic login for your account:

1.

Open System Preferences and click on "Accounts."

2.

Click on your account name in the left-hand pane.

3.

Click the locked icon at the bottom-left. Enter your password.

4.

Click "Login Options" at the bottom of the Accounts pane.

5.

Uncheck the box to "Automatically log in as."

6.

Click the lock icon again to lock it up.

Secure Empty Trash

Normally, when you put files in the Trash and then "Empty Trash," the files aren't really thrown away. The file name is removed from the disk directory, but the file is still there until the computer overwrites that space on the hard disk with new data. That's why some disk utilities are able to recover files you've thrown away.

If you've moved sensitive files to the Trash, you can make sure they can't be recovered. From the Finder menu, choose "Secure Empty Trash." This command overwrites files that are in the Trash with erroneous data, making them completely unrecoverable.

Private Browsing

When you visit web sites, Safari keeps a history of where you've been so you can easily retrace your steps back to a site of interest. It also creates the possiblity that curious snoopers could check to see which sites you've visited, hoping to learn something confidential about you.

But in Safari you can turn on "Private Browsing." When you do this, web pages are not added to the History menu, form information isn't saved for AutoFill (including names and passwords), search terms are not added to the pop-up menu in the the web search box, and items are automatically removed from the Downloads window. The Back and Forward buttons still work until you close the Safari window.

To turn on "Private Browsing," go to the Safari menu and choose "Private Browsing" (shown to the left). It turns itself off every time you quit, so when you restart Safari, you'll have to turn it back on again.

To turn off private browsing, return to the Safari menu and choose "Private Browsing" again to remove the checkmark next to it. Or quit Safari.

Empty the Cache

You might also want to choose "Empty Cache..." from the Safari menu whenever you're finished working on the Internet so no one can go see which pages you've been to recently by looking in your cache folder.

Clear the History

At any time, whether or not you are using "Private Browsing," you can always go to the History menu and choose "Clear History" to get rid of the list of web pages you've visited.

Extra Security Features

The Security preferences offer several security features that won't prevent your laptop from getting stolen, but will prevent thieves from having access to your data.

Open System Preferences and choose "Security."

  • Require password to wake this computer from sleep or screen saver. If you have your laptop set to sleep after a certain number of minutes or if you have a screen saver set to go on, this feature helps to safeguard your files when you leave the computer unattended if it has gone to sleep or the screen saver has turned on, someone must enter the password to get back to the screen. This is incredibly useful if your laptop gets stolen while it's already turned on as soon as someone shuts the lid and puts it to sleep, they won't be able to get back in. Ha.

  • Disable automatic login. Now anyone using your computer must enter the correct login password.

  • Log out after _ minutes of activity. This lets you set how soon after being unattended your laptop will log out. Make sure it requires a password to log back in.

    See page 149 for another way to turn off automatic login.


Encrypt Your Home Folder with FileVault

For serious privacy, data encryption is the solution. Encryption scrambles the selected data and it can only be unscrambled by entering the correct password.

For total data security, use FileVault. FileVault encrypts your entire Home folder using 128-bit AES encryption (theoretically un-hackable). It protects the entire contents of your Home folder, yet you can work with your files.

This might be most important in this kind of scenario: You're working on your laptop, get distracted, and someone swipes it right out from under you. You've got your sleep feature password-protected (see the previous page), so he can't get to your data. So the disgusting little creep who stole your laptop slithers home, inserts a startup disk, and proceeds to reinstall the operating system, but doesn't replace your Home folder and files, hoping to get to them. Aha! Foiled againif you've got FileVault turned on.

1.

Open System Preferences and choose "Security."

2.

Click "Set Master Password" and set a password and a hint.

3.

Click "Turn on FileVault..." to start FileVault. This can take well over an hour, depending on how much and what you have on your laptop.

Once turned on and enabled with a master password, FileVault automatically encrypts and decrypts data on the fly.

Encrypt Only Selected Files and Folders

If you have just a few files or folders you want to make secure, you may not want to use FileVault to encrypt your entire Home folder. Instead, you can store critical data inside an encrypted, password-protected disk image. This is not an "on-the-fly" feature; that is, you will have to open the disk image every time you want to use the file.

A disk image is a package of data, useful for storing files or for transferring files to others. You can choose to encrypt, compress, and/or password-protect the data.

A disk image looks like this. Double-click it when you want to open it. You'll get an icon that looks like a removable drive, as shown below.

Double-click this white drive icon. Your files are inside. If you chose the "read/write" format (see the next page), you can open and make changes to these files, add more files to the window, and they are all still encrypted.

Once you open a disk image, it is available without a password until you log out and back in again.

(In the Desktop window, this icon looks like a folder, not a drive.)


To make a disk image:

1.

Put all the files you want to encrypt into a single folder. (Always be sure you've got backup disks of important files somewhere else!)

2.

Open Disk Utility (it's in the Utilities folder, inside the Applications folder). The window (below) shows your hard disk in the left column. Any external disks that are connected will also appear in this list.

3.

Select the volume (disk) that contains the folder you want to encrypt.

4.

From the File menu, choose "New," then choose "Disk Image from Folder...," as shown below.

5.

In the "Select Folder to Image" window (shown below), select the folder that you want to turn into a disk image. Click the "Image" button.

6.

In the "New Image From Folder" window (below-left), name the disk image and choose a location to save it to.

From the "Image Format" pop-up menu, choose:

  • read/write. if you want to add other files later and make changes to files.

  • read only if you don't need to add or change the files.

  • compressed if you don't need to add files later and if you want to save as much disk space as possible

  • DVD/CD master if you want to make exact copies of a disk. This is the format you choose to create a bootable disc.

    From the "Encryption" pop-up menu, chose "AES-128."

7.

Click "Save." An "Authenticate" alert box opens (below-right). Enter a password; do NOT check "Remember password." Click OK.

Warning

If you forget this password, YOUR DATA WILL BE LOST.

Secure Your Sharing Preferences

When connected to a network (wireless or wired), you can prevent access to folders on your computer. Use the "Sharing" preferences.

If you need to access another computer on the network, make sure you both have "Personal File Sharing" turned on.


1.

Open System Preferences and choose "Sharing." In the "Sharing" window, click the "Services" tab.

2.

In the list, turn off services that are turned on (check a box to remove its checkmark). Or click on a service to select it, then click the "Stop" button.

3.

Click the "Firewall" tab (below-right) to show the Firewall pane.

4.

Click the "Start" button to turn the Firewall on. The firewall allows incoming communication to any services in the list that you checked in the Services pane. All other inbound network connections are denied.

Advanced Firewall Settings

Make your computer even more secure with advanced firewall settings: Click the "Advanced" button (above-right), then checkmark "Block udp Traffic" (used by some servers that may interfere with some network applications, such as Voice over ip), "Enable Firewall Logging" (creates a firewall activity log), and "Enable Stealth Mode" (ensures that uninvited network traffic receives no responseand makes hacking your computer nearly impossible).




Macs on the Go!(c) Guide to Mobile Computing for Mac Laptops Using Mac OS X
Macs on the Go
ISBN: 0321247485
EAN: 2147483647
Year: 2006
Pages: 119

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