SEC staffers slammed for serious security snafus There are red faces at the Securities and Exchange Commission after a report highlighted computer security failings by agency staff that forced it to spend $200,000 to check whether it had lost critical information. Staff at the Trading and Markets Division were found to have stored highly confidential and market-sensitive …
If you must take a laptop (for notetaking, e-mail, websurfing, etc), take a brand new one, or one with a brand new hard drive, set up with minimum needs and only communicate from a disposable webmail address to other disposable webmail addresses. Scrub the hard drive after you've taken any needed .txt files off it.
Seriously... how much does an extra hard drive cost? Hell, you could boot to a thumb drive too and get most of the way there too (assuming the HDD was encrypted) although leaving the HDD at home would be preferable.
I can only assume that the staffers sent to these conferences are Security personnel. Way to set an example! To quote Despair.com: "It could be that the purpose of [their] life is only to serve as a warning to others."
Secured or not, they realy should not be taking anything remotely private into a hacker convention. Certainly a laptop as you have said that is wiped after it is image dumped and compared with how it left to identify any possible new threats that poked there way onto it whilst there. Then popped into a cupboard after reimaging ready for next time. Reimaged from external DVD/blueray discs to eliminate any bios cleverness that may or may not infect a imaging server, trust nothing remember.
The only data that should ever be on a laptop at such places is test/madeup data that you want leaked to see how the water flows so to speak.
Security is only an illusion at a point in time, whats secure today is not garanteed secure tomorrow and with that was not secure when it was secure, also easier on the brain when you can just remove the security by making it a non issue.
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