[Bradford] A topic suggestion

[Philip Wyett]

On Fri, 2008-10-31 at 11:21 +0000, David Carpenter wrote:
> I'd be interested to hear a bit about keeping your portable data safe.
> 
> In the light of government gaffs over lost laptops etc, what should we
> be doing to keep the data on our laptops, pen drives, ipods(?) (I don't
> have one!) safe if we lose them?
> 
> Anybody else?
> 
> ...oh and if you do find my laptop can you please return it to me, and
> don't look in the 'secret passwords' folder please. Just kidding!
> 
> David
> 

Hi all,

While most are advocating folder or disk encryption there are some
issues to be taken into account.

 * Forgetting passwords
 * A file system on top of a file system and the possible failure
   and recovery scenarios it creates.

Personally I am not a fan of encryption in the folder or disk form and
prefer to only encrypting what I need to encrypt which isn't much on my
laptop. There are some essential things you can do to make it harder for
anyone to access your data.

 * Use a BOIS password at boot and to access the BIOS.

   This makes it harder to boot the laptop especially booting with a
   live CD which enables you to boot then mount the whole internal
   drive.

 * Use a grub password.

   This will stop the creative booting in single user mode and bypassing
   root and other passwords.

 * Use a strong user password.

   This one is a gimme and the one people fail on the most. :-/

Regards

Phil
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