SafeBoot - Mobile Data Security

Our Take is contributed by SafeBoot Chief Technology Officer, Simon Hunt 

To hear that a laptop with pictures and information regarding 9/11 has been stolen is a fascinating demonstration of the situation many IT professionals find themselves in today.

Can you imagine a security-related situation more in peoples minds than 9/11? The whole terrible incident did more to heighten the awareness for the need for security in our day to day lives than any designed campaign or user education could have ever achieved.

Yet here we have a senior government employee leaving a valuable laptop in a parked car - something that in many fortune 500 companies today would be grounds for dismissal.

Laptop theft from parked vehicles is such an obvious and predictable event. Perhaps that is why most car parking lots have signs telling you to remove all valuables. I'm sure Mr. DePaolo didn't mean to have his laptop stolen, but we have come to realize that official vehicles are not safe from random theft anymore. And having "OCME" painted on the side might even make you more of a target.

Cisco recently interviewed 100 IT security chiefs and asked them if data security was a board level concern in their company - roughly half said it was not. If this is also true in government circles, what hope do we IT professionals have of making our users take care of their data?