It seems like more and more of the employees in our company are travelling with laptops that have wireless capability. Management has expressed a concern of charges they are seeing from some of the hotels that we use on a regular basis for internet access. Some of the employees feel that they are relagated to finding open hotspots for sending/receiving email and other internet access. With all the hacking that seems to be going on with laptops, what can you suggest that I do to help protect us from having problems? Via the Internet
It seems like more and more of the employees in our company are travelling with laptops that have wireless capability. Management has expressed a concern of charges they are seeing from some of the hotels that we use on a regular basis for internet access. Some of the employees feel that they are relagated to finding open hotspots for sending/receiving email and other internet access. With all the hacking that seems to be going on with laptops, what can you suggest that I do to help protect us from having problems?
Via the Internet
There are several things to try. Having a good firewall in place on the laptop is the first step that you should take. Although Windows XP does have a firewall feature in it, I haven’t been that impressed with it and usually disable in. In its place, I use ZoneAlarm (on my personal laptop). There are several other good candidates that can be used. Look at what is out there, try them out and see what works best for you.
Next is to have some type of VPN in place for your users to connect to when travelling. Because not everybody is PC savvy, try to find one that makes as few changes to the laptops as possible. Cisco’s 3005 VPN Concentrator offers this type of option. You can go with either a Web browser to get access to corporate info or if the users needs are a little more demanding, you can implement a conventional VPN client for the user to access your network. If you don’t have this type of VPN option available, check out HotSpotVPN and PublicVPN, which provide encryption to and from your users’ laptops. At least with these last two options, you are trying to keep preying eyes on the wireless side from seeing what is going to and from the laptop while it is aware from your network.
Another option is to implement some type of encryption on the laptop to provide some type of protection to the data on the hardware that belongs to your company. There are several options here that range from protecting the entire hard drive to just selected directories. Doing some search-engine scanning will get you a list of options to consider. You can also look at biometric-enabled flash drives that require a finger swipe before documents can be access or changed on the device.
As with Windows updates, you will need to keep the solutions you choose current and periodically review what you are doing to see if something better exists that would provide more protection.
