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Handling Corporate Laptop Theft Gracefully
Billosaur writes "From NPR, we get a Marketplace story about the theft of corporate laptops and the sensitive data they may contain, specifically how to handle the repercussions. From the story: 'TriWest operates in about 21 states. It's based in Phoenix, Arizona. In December of 2002, somebody broke into the company's offices and stole two computer hard drives.And those hard drives contained the personal information of 550,000 of our customers from privates in the military all the way up to the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.' How they handled the situation earned them an award from the Public Relations Society of America."
Please, never link to a transcript of (what I hope was a podcast, because it wasn't good enough for radio) again. I didn't (couldn't) read the linked article, so I'm just going to comment on the summary.
Data that sensitive in those sort of quantities should be encrypted. Triwest as a health care provider should know that.
It's unclear how the story & the headline relate (as the headline is laptops, and the story appears to be about hard drives), but laptops should not have sensitive data in the clear on them. Either access it through a secure VPN or (if net access is unavailable), keep it on truecrypt or similar.
Sure, data theft is still possible, but taking a few simple precautions wills stop cheap hardware theft ballooning into a PR/security nightmare.
There are shills on slashdot. Apparently, I'm one of them.
I think we all know that the real question here is, in a straight, clean fight, who wins, Airwolf or Bluethunder?. Now I know what your thinking? What chance does stright to video star Jan-Michael Vincent have against HAL chess playing, shark killing, SeaQuest DSV commanding Roy Scheider? Well to you I say, don't forget that Airwolf co-pilot was none other than Poseidon surviving, Gattaca acting, SpongeBob SquarePants Mermaid Man (I shit you not) Ernest Borgnine. Yeah people. Not so easy now is it?
-- "Can't sleep, clowns will eat me!"
Perhaps you can't read the OP's sigfile?
> Or perhaps his sig is not relevant to the discussion, which is what moderaters
> should be looking at?
So you set the agenda for moderation now?
> At worst, his sig is tactless.
There's a limited range of options. The important part is the sign of the value, as that affects the score, and not the text alongside it.