Security comes home
Although security is my job, the importance of it really hits home sometimes in a truly personal experience, and unfortunately that happened to me at the end of last week. My car got broken into, and laptops stolen. They also stole my USB backup drive. The first thing is that no matter how hard you try, it seems like there are some things which it is extremely difficult to protect against. The weak link in my car was obviously the window they smashed to gain entry. I had taken all the precautions I could - the laptops were in the boot, out of sight, but I couldn't stop them from smashing the window and pulling down the back seats to gain entry.
I'm very fortunate in practicing what I preach (most of the time!), so although the removable hard drive was my main backup and that got stolen as well, I had made sure that I had a backup on another machine at home. I had also encrypted the folders on the drive which contained sensitive data. Although is seems a bit ironic that my previous posting had information on Bitlocker technology - that would have been an ideal solution for a situation like this....
Anyway, in summary, it's been a fairly traumatic time, and it does make you feel a bit helpless that there is something you can essentially do very little about to stop break-ins, but it's reminded me of the fact that although a laptop feels like a personal posession, that you can safely store all your data on, it is imnportant to protect it through encryption if any of that data is sensitive, and also that it is important to have offsite backups (and kept up to date).
Hopefully you'll never have to experience this, but at least I've been able to recover my data as quickly as possible. The strong password and encryption basically means that they will only really have the hardware, none of the IP.
