Jon’s Network

The latest Boeing laptop theft, which was reported by Information Week on December 15th, 2006, contained identifying information on 382,000 Boeing employees. 

"Boeing is trying to figure out how to best protect data in this portable world we live in," says Tim Neale, a spokesman for Boeing. "In November 2005, Boeing had to deal with its first laptop theft. That machine, which still has not been recovered, contained identifying information on 161,000 current and former employees. Neale says that after that first incident, company executives and managers started working to keep it from happening again. One of the first things they did was to instruct workers to get sensitive data off their hard drives and then managers had to check to make sure it had been done. Company policy discourages saving sensitive employee files on their laptops, notes Neale. Workers are supposed to work off the servers whenever possible, keeping the data behind the company firewall. "If you do download the information onto a laptop, it’s supposed to be temporary and the information is supposed to be encrypted," he says, adding that the employee who was just fired didn’t follow this policy.

The problem with Boeing’s policy is it lets the employee decide to encrypt or not.  Like backing up your hard drive, if encryption isn’t done automatically, it probably won’t be done at all.  What they should do is get a whole disk encryption solution that encrypts the entire drive without any user intervention required.  The end user would notice nothing other than having to enter a password before the computer boots.  You can encrypt other portable devices, like Palm Pilots, too.  Boeing probably knows this but either hasn’t completely rolled out the software or hasn’t decided which solution to use. 

A couple of options for whole disk encryption are Utimaco SafeGuard Easy and PGP Whole Disk Encryption.