Do you have a laptop? How you would feel if your laptop was lost or stolen. Maybe you looked away for a moment at the café or airport, or someone broke into your office, house or car.

The consequences could be disastrous as theft is a real issues Security provider Norton, reports that over 97% of stolen laptops are never recovered and unsecured laptops provide a trove of information for bad actors.

What is on your laptop?

Most business users have some sort of confidential information stored or accessible from their laptops.

As well as sensitive data, you may automatically login to a variety of websites / and or work networks from your laptop. In this case, the person with your laptop gains easy access to log into your workplace network or business related websites. All it takes is one click using your saved access credentials.

Yes, the security risks related to losing a laptop can be scary and you need to secure your laptop with these smart security measures.

1. Remote Wipe

Protect against data loss by setting up remote wipes. So that if your laptop is misplaced or stolen, you can remotely wipe all its data as soon as it connects to the internet.

A remote wipe can be configured to delete certain files or folders on a device, or it can wipe all the device’s hard drives or render the device unusable.

There are some limitations to this approach though. The device needs to be online to receive the wipe command and the administrator needs to know about the loss or theft to initiate the command. Plus, in some cases, the wiped data may still be recoverable by motivated attackers.

So along with a remote wipe ability we also recommend you use encryption on your laptops drive.

2. Disk Encryption

Encryption stop access to your data unless the user has the encryption key. This makes it challenging for a bad actor to make sense of everything on your laptop.

Both Windows and macOS offer free built-in encryption options. BitLocker is the encryption utility for Windows and FileVault for macOS.

3. Other Laptop Security Best Practices

Of course, the best thing to do is avoid storing sensitive information on your laptop but that usually is not possible. Some other strategies to help protect and secure your laptop includes:

• • using a strong password or passphrase on your laptop user account;
  • enabling two-factor authentication to access your laptop;
  • avoid using public Wi-Fi networks (instead tether to your phone or get a 4G / 5G modem);
  • using secure Web browsers;
  • regularly backing up your data to an external hard drive, cloud storage and / or a network location.

With the right strategies, you can significantly enhance the security of your laptop and reduce the risks associated with potential threats if your laptop goes missing. We can help secure your laptop, contact us today.