Answer these questions about your laptop:
- Do you have login to your laptop with a password of 12 characters or less?
- Do you have your browser set up to remember your passwords for any sites that require a login?
- Banner?
- Blackboard?
- Email?
- Your Bank?
- Do you view any confidential information with your web browser?
- Banner pages with confidential student information?
- Banner pages with your payroll information?
- Your Bank Account status?
- Do you download any spreadsheet files with any confidential student, employee or financial data?
- Do you delete files with confidential data when you no longer need them?
- Do you have any email messages that you wouldn't want some people to see?
- Does your laptop check for operating system updates and patches?
- Do you install those updates promptly?
- Do you reboot your laptop after installing updates?
- Do you know that putting your laptop to "sleep" is not the same as rebooting?
Would you be concerned about a security breach if your laptop were lost or stolen?
Now let's review the consequences of your answers above.
- If a hacker gets possession of your laptop, there are tools available that will reveal your login password in just a few minutes, if your password is 12 characters long or less.
- Once access to your computer is breached, your browser will show all the passwords that it is remembering for you, and where those passwords can be used.
- Your browser caches pages that you have recently viewed and the cache can be viewed directly.
- Once your computer is breached, all the files can be examined by the user at the keyboard or the hacker controlling the computer.
- Deleted files are not really erased and may not be overwritten for some time. It is often possible for a hacker to examine and recover data from deleted files.
- Your email client may be downloading your email as you read it and storing it on your hard drive.
- If your laptop isn't patched, hackers from anywhere on the internet can silently gain control over your computer, view all of your files, monitor your use, and even use your laptop for their purposes anytime that it is online.
Now are you concerned about a security breach? Does your laptop need better management, better configuration and file encryption?
Utah Code Title 13, Chapter 44 addresses the protection of confidential data.
