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Posts Tagged ‘laptop encryption’

Ohio teacher sues Software firm for accessing stolen laptop

September 9th, 2011

Absolute's LoJack causes trouble for school teacher

Who would have thought that stolen laptops could cause such uproar? The latest incident of a stolen laptop caused an Ohio teacher quite an embarrassment.

The story

It all started when Clements-Jeffrey, an Ohio substitute teacher, bought a used laptop from one of her students in the year 2008. Apparently, it was a stolen laptop, which Ms Jeffrey had bought from a student for $40. The student wanted to make fast money and had taken this route.

Incidentally, the laptop was property of Ohio’s Clark County School District. The school had a contract with Absolute Software, which installs hidden tracking software known as LoJack on all of its machines to track a thief in case of data theft. This software records all data that the user is accessing. LoJack is a legal security service but in this particular case, the company has violated the Electronic Communications Privacy Act and the Stored Communications Act.

The tracking company had been keeping track of her laptop, which of course is fine, but it crossed the line when it viewed her naked images and captured them. The woman had been sitting naked in front of her laptop and chatting to her school sweet heart. Absolute passed these sexually explicit private images to the police along with the location data.

Ms Clements and her boyfriend, Carlton Smith, who lived in Boston, were shocked beyond doubt and sued Absolute Software for violating their personal rights.

The court ruling

Absolute’s defense – Absolute asked a summary judgment in its favor. According to them, the officer was just doing his job when he captured sexually explicit images of Susan Clements-Jeffrey who was chatting with her boyfriend through a webcam and later passed them to the police in an effort to track the thief of the stolen laptop.

Absolute further added that it was acting on behalf of its customer, the school district, and was covered under “color of law” and “safe harbor” statutes. It appears that the company had an agreement with the school district which reads “the ability to view and recover any files that are present” on the school’s computers.

The judge wrote in his decision “It is something entirely different to violate federal wiretapping laws by intercepting the electronic communications of the person using the stolen laptop.”

According to the Judge Absolute had crossed its limit. There was no need to capture these images at all once it had tracked the IP number of the laptop. The regular procedure is to provide a suspect’s IP address to law enforcement agents, so that they could issue a subpoena to the suspect’s ISP to obtain the user’s name and physical address.

Alertsec helps track stolen laptops

80% of data loss is due to lost or stolen equipment. 50% of network breaches take place by using passwords from lost or stolen equipment. Laptop encryption is the solution to laptop theft problem. Small and big companies are now realizing the importance of tracking software. Alertsec offers laptop encryption service to secure your data

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Posted in Computer security, computer security software, laptop encryption, laptop theft

Tags: breach notification breach notification laws data breach Enter your zip code here IP address laptop laptop encryption Ohio Substitute teacher

Computer containing personal data of Meridian Health Workers stolen

July 14th, 2011

Meridian Healthcare employee victim of laptop theft

It just takes one quick grab to steal a laptop or mobile. Users make it easy for thieves by putting such stuff out in the open in a restaurant, in an outside pocket of a backpack or leaving windows open at night.

One such incident took place recently in Meridian.

The incident

According to Asbury Park police Detective Capt. Anthony Salerno the theft occurred between 2 and 7 a.m. June 25.

It appears that a 55-year-old woman had left a window open at her home on Locust Drive before going to bed. In the morning she found that the screen had been cut and the window had been opened more. Her house was burgled and items taken were her work laptop computer and seven thumb drives containing financial documents for her employer, Meridian Health. The heist also included second laptop owned by the woman, two credit cards, a 19-inch television set and a bicycle. The items were around $5,000.

The woman’s laptop contained personal information of Meridian health care’s employees. There is no indication that any of the employee information was accessed. Probably identity theft was not the thief’s intention.

As to how many employees are affected is still not known. The police are also trying to find out whether the Asbury Park woman was authorized to bring the computer equipment home. The woman’s designation or profile in the company is also not known.

Laptop theft part of Cybercrime

Cyber-crime is defined as an intentional crashing of the servers, the stealing of important data, or the release of a virus or other malicious software.

Cyber criminals are getting more creative and big and small companies are in a frenzy to deploy new tools and procedures to deal with these new attacks

Security Measures taken by Meridian Healthcare

Meridian is the parent company of Jersey Shore University Medical Center in Neptune, Riverview Medical Center in Red Bank, Ocean Medical Center in Brick, Southern Ocean Medical Center in Stafford and Bayshore Community Hospital in Holmdel. Its partner companies include home health services and rehabilitation centers.

A national identity theft consulting company, appointed by Meridian Healthcare, is notifying the employees and providing them with comprehensive identity theft protection at Meridian’s expense for three years.

Learning from the incident, Meridian leaders are reforming security policies by offering continued protection of team members’ personal identification information in-house as well as hiring a security consultant to conduct an independent audit of Meridian’s policies and procedures.

Hire Alertsec

This incident stresses the need for data protection applications. The need of a Data encryption software and recovery software is felt by big and small companies in today’s vulnerable data world. The threat could have simply been reduced to an insurance matter by a mere investment of $13/month. Certainly a small price to pay compared to what can happen if you lose confidential or sensitive data. Alertsec Xpress offers a very good and easy-to-use laptop security service that includes more than the traditional software licensing model.

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Posted in Data Protection, Uncategorized, identity theft, laptop encryption, laptop theft

Tags: Anthony Salerno Computer security Data storage device Encryption Enter your zip code here Health care identity theft laptop laptop encryption laptop encryption solution laptop theft Personal computer Personally identifiable information security Theft

ICO HITS OUT AT DATA BREACH FIGURES

April 30th, 2011

Laptop Encryption

According to different sources the number of cases registered in ICO is 2565, while action taken against only 37 cases. This generates a huge dissatisfaction against the working process of ICO. The power of ICO is now under doubt. The rumour is that ICO is nothing but a paper tiger and as a result of it everybody is thinking that the number data breaches cases will increase as there is less chances on punishment.

The fault of ICO was highlighted after data breaching incident of Viasat. After that case Viasat claimed that ICO is playing with the figures of fine for data breaching. According to different sources Viasat was penalized by $310,000 for data breaching while the actual figure have to be $500,000.

There is also more dissatisfaction against the ICO in different Organizations due to the lethargic working process of ICO. As, according to different expert the number of cases of data breaching is increasing day by day so ICO has to be more quick prompt in taking action, but the reality tells that the number of cases recorded in the ICO remains static. Means the actual data has been hampered.

ICO denies all those complain and in a conference they announced that they have the actual figures and that is 37. They also assured the public that they are in hurry to take action against those organizations that are involving in data breaching.

But the truth is far different from the announcement of ICO. According the inner source of ICO, ICO has lost a large number of report files related to data breaching. Though there are a several number steps can be taken by ICO against data breaching but they are not interested to it. Without telling the organizations about the importance of data encryption software, laptop encryption software, encryption, data security, importance of hard drive encryption, laptop encryption, full disk encryption, computer protection they are more interested in taking fines. And the main problem is that they are also not very sure about the amount of fines, as a result of that the figure varies from organization to organization.

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Alertsec Xpress is a very easy and convenient service which enables us to secure valuable information on our laptops. Alertsec Xpress has found the ultimate way of deploying the protection via the web. They have found the ultimate way of deploying the protection via the web. They are the no.1 encryption service provider for hundreds of banks and financial institutions worldwide.

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Posted in Alertsec Express, Data Protection, Encryption, computer security software, full disk encryption, laptop encryption

Tags: data security Encryption laptop encryption laptop security

Laptop Encryption: Protect Your Data from Hackers

April 28th, 2011

Laptop Encryption

A simple incident can turn to be the biggest problem of your life and later you may find that it happened just because of your negligence. Though there are several laptop encryption software and laptop encryption software available in the market to secure our personal and professional data but still we neglect it.

According to ICO as most of the organization does not follow the rules of data encryption and they are less interested about implementing any laptop encryption software, so as a result most of the stored data of those organizations remain unencrypted. So, any sort of loss or theft can cause a huge damage to those organizations. As an example they mentioned about the incident of Freehold School. A laptop was theft from the car of one the teachers of that school, the laptop contained the details of around 90 pupils and all those data were unencrypted.

As we are aware that the hackers are more interested in personal data and they are such powerful that minimum negligence to the data encryption act can harm your system. As a prove we can take the incident of Ashampoo, a German software company, though they are also a computer security software company but the hackers got success to hack their system and stole the personal details of their clients. As Ashampoo took an immediate step to protect their data the loss of information did not harm them too much, but the incident could have been more damaging.

In case of Freehold Community School, ICO found that the management of the school was totally unaware about the importance of laptop encryption software. Though their systems contain personal data but still they did not protect their data or they did not follow any security system to protect their data. As most of the organization does not take the importance of data encryption seriously so ICO wanted to take financial steps against them. They wanted to do surveys on different organization and if any organization been found guilty under the data law act, they want to punish them.

The ICO takes some routine steps to make aware the institutes and organizations about the importance of laptop encryption software. The steps that ICO can take to secure and encrypt the data of an organization are as follows:

Criminal prosecution.
Non-criminal enforcement.
Audit.

Now the main question is how to stay secure………

Though there are various data encryption software and sites available to protect your personal data but you can follow some routine works to maintain the preliminary protection of the data by,

1. Any attachment should not be opened randomly.

2. Use antivirus softwares to your system to protect it from the virus.

3. Always treat messages from unknown senders with suspicion.

4. After any sort of doubt contact immediately to the nearest police station and lodge a complaint.

As, the hackers are increasing in numbers and also improving in quality of action day by day , so you have to be sure that your system is encrypted, portable and mobile data storage devices, so that you can feel free from any sort of damage to your personal data or the data stored in your system or in storage devices. Because “precaution is better that cure”.

About Alertsec:

Alertsec Xpress is the No.1 encryption service provider for hundreds of banks and financial institutions worldwide. They are providing 24*7 customer service system. By offering computer security software, encryption with lowest TCO (Total Cost of Operation), Checkpoint and Pointec they are assuring to make data secure. For more details about Alertsec log on to; http://www.alertsec.com

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Posted in Alertsec Express, Computer security, Data Protection, Encryption, computer security software, full disk encryption, laptop encryption, laptop theft

Tags: Encryption laptop laptop encryption laptop encryption solution security

Burglary at Edmon Low Library: Sometimes Data is more Valuable than Money

February 19th, 2011

Image of a Western Digital 250Gb SATA Hard Dri...

Image via Wikipedia

Sometimes sensitive data security matters even more than money. Yes, this time a Dell laptop computer, a external drive and some more valuable things were stolen from Edmon Low Library between 27th and 31st of January. David Peters, coordinator for the special collections and university archives said, “I had some international coins missing too, but those are minor compared to my external drive”. Theft is becoming very common at Colvin and personal items are disappearing from campus, in classrooms and in on campus restaurants and residence halls in a big amount.

How Burglary took place

As reported by Peters that as soon as he stepped into his office on Jan. 31 around 8 a.m., he sensed something wrong there. He could easily make out the difference by how things were placed in his room like his piggy bank was missing and the external drive was unplugged from the USB cable. Later, he discovered that his laptop was also missing from its case. On the discovery of this event, he contacted the library security and OSU police immediately.

Peters said in a statement, “My initial reaction was a sick feeling”. I told myself, ‘You’ve got to be kidding me’. “I felt pretty sorry for myself at first, I had other, less valuable things to me that they could have taken, but the big things are what were missing” he said.

Peters said the cops took down his statement and were looking at possibilities on campus, but nothing has been resolved yet. He said “My external hard drive contained personal research also. Folder headings on the hard drive are: Gallagher, family, family photos and Microsoft Word and Excel files. The irreplaceable family history and photos on the drive are what matter the most” he added.

Description of the stolen things

Describing the details of the stolen things he added that the Laptop was black in colour with gray trim and had a plastic cover. Its original power cord was left when it was stolen. Laptop was about five years old and its worth was less than $50. He also mentioned that the laptop belonged to a service organization called the Stillwater Rotary Club and the record it contained is almost impossible to rebuild from scratch. He told that the 50 GB Western Digital passport external drive was less than two years old and worth about $20.

Peters is ready to offer a sum of $100 reward for everyone if the laptop and hard drive are returned back, without any further probes. He also announced any expenses related to its return will me reimbursed.

If you use the Laptop encryption software or full encryption software in your device, nothing can harm your data even when your device is taken or stolen. Nowadays encryption is very simple, you just need to install it in your system.

Laptop Encryption Software with Alertsec

This news exemplifies the need for data protection applications like Data encryption software and Laptop encryption. In an incident which highlights the need of a data security and recovery software, the threat could have simply been reduced to an insurance matter by a mere investment of $13/month. The information would have been secure with no loss what so ever. That is certainly a small price to pay compared to what can happen if you lose confidential or sensitive data. Alertsec Xpress offers a very good and easy-to-use laptop security service that includes more than the traditional software licensing model. Feel free to subscribe for your personal 30-day free trial.