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Delete Data On Netbook If Stolen?

Posted by kdawson on from the grab-brick-smash-window dept.

An anonymous reader writes "I have just moved overseas on a 2-year working holiday visa and so I picked up a netbook for the interim, an MSI Wind U100 Plus running WinXP. I love it to bits. But as I am traveling around I am somewhat worried about theft. Most of my important stuff is in Gmail and Google Docs; however, I don't always have Net access and find it useful to gear up the offline versions for both. Ideally I would like to securely delete all the offline data from the hard drive if it were stolen. Since it is backed up in the cloud, and the netbook is so cheap I don't really care about recovery, a solution that bricks it would be fine — and indeed would give me a warm glow knowing a prospective thief would have wasted their time. But it's not good if they can extract the HD and get at the data some other way. All thief-foiling suggestions are welcome, be they software, hardware, or other."

6 of 459 comments (clear)

  1. Encryption by pyite · · Score: 5, Informative

    Encrypt the entire drive with TrueCrypt or something. Use a strong cipher and a very strong passphrase. The laptop is as good as bricked to anyone who gets it.

    --

    "Nature doesn't care how smart you are. You can still be wrong." - Richard Feynman

    1. Re:Encryption by wvmarle · · Score: 4, Informative

      Your average thief will try to resell it as soon as he can. Most thieves are not interested in the loot as such but in the money they can get for it.

    2. Re:Encryption by Wrath0fb0b · · Score: 5, Informative

      My personal experience with a Inspiron 1520 is that whole disk encryption significantly reduces battery life, which is a real usability problem.

      Most likely, when I get back to the states (I only encrypted for some overseas travel anyway), I will decrypt it and move back to an encrypted truecrypt container for the small number of documents that are really sensitive.

  2. What do they want to steal? by 1s44c · · Score: 4, Informative

    Most casual thieves want the hardware to use, resell, or simply because it's pretty. They don't give a toss about your data unless they can get easy cash out of it.

    Encrypt the disk to protect your data. It doesn't even have to be very strong encryption but obviously good encryption is better if your CPU can handle it. You can save CPU cycles by only encrypting data that really needs to be kept personal.

    Personally I'd be tempted to have some kind of low trick on there just to fuck with their minds. Add a script like
    echo "GPS location tracking started..."
    sleep 13
    echo "Device location found and reported."
    read x

    There is absolutely no security in this but casual thieves are normally not too smart so might shit their pants.

    1. Re:What do they want to steal? by subreality · · Score: 4, Informative

      It doesn't even have to be very strong encryption but obviously good encryption is better if your CPU can handle it.

      AES is quite fast on 32-bit CPUs. There's no excuse for bad crypto.

  3. Re:Whole Disk Encryption by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Informative

    I know it doesn't help the OP, but on linux-based netbooks it's trivial to re-install linux with whole disk encryption if you want to upgrade to Ubuntu anyway. I've been running this way on my primary laptop for over a year and haven't really noticed any performance degradation.