Computer identity theft can be quite common, as people are seeking to gain access to your personal details, such as driver’s licence numbers, credit cards, social security numbers and others. All these information can be stored inside your laptop and it’s estimated that nearly one million laptops are stolen each year around the world. This is a staggering statistics and it makes perfect sense if you are being active in preventing identity theft.
Laptops are portable links to the digital world. You use them to access banking account, social networking websites and purchasing items online. In fact, it is considered normal to send important and private information across the web. Laptops can get stolen and you should be prepared for this possibility. Make sure that people don’t easily have access to your personal details, even if your laptops get stolen. It will be possible for these thieves to carry out any illegal transaction. Preventing access to your personal detail could save you a lot of inconvenience, time and money.
Find ways to remotely wipe your computer data, if your laptops get stolen. There are programs that can help you do this. All programs and files will be removed, so your laptops are rendered unusable. Critical data can be wiped with multiple passes, so they can’t be recovered using special software. If people manage to steal business data, the consequence can be very expensive. With remote wipe, you should make your laptop unusable with a single command.
You should prepare a backdoor that allows you to gain access to your laptop without the criminal being aware of that. A security program could run in the background to gain data about the thief’s activity. If your laptop is equipped with GPS, you may even locate the thief, by secretly enabling the location feature. Geo location program could determine the location of your laptop to within 50 feet. This will greatly assist recovery and law enforcement officers could apprehend the thief quickly.
If your laptops are stolen, there’s a possibility that you will be sued for negligence. So, it is important for you to take necessary risk management steps:
- Set up invisible access through the Internet to your laptop, in case, it gets stolen
- Make it possible to access your files remotely on the stolen computer, using another computer or mobile device. This way, you can retrieve files and delete them in the stolen laptop.
- Enable Geo location feature if possible, especially if your laptop has GPS functionality. You may report to the authority about the probably location of the thief, so your stolen property can be recovered.
- Set up a monitoring program. After removing critical files remotely, it is a good idea to stay hidden. The monitoring program should be enabled to track and record what thieves are doing with your laptop. You can record this information as evidence when these criminals are apprehended.
- Render your laptop unusable. If it appears that you can never recover your laptop, you should render your laptop unusable remotely.