Beware Trojan Horse Laptops bearing Gifts: Security Risk

The FBI has launched an investigation to find out who is sending unsolicited laptops to state governors across the country.

The Service is reporting that governors and state officials in at least 10 US states have received mysterious computers in the mail.

The mystery began in West Virginia earlier this month when Gov. Joe Manchin’s office received five Compaq computers on Aug. 5. A week later, Manchin’s office received a sixth notebook, a Hewlett-Packard model.

The Charleston Gazette, which first reported the story, said Manchin’s office didn’t turn on the machines for security reasons. Very wise! West Virginia state police said HP confirmed the notebooks were ordered online for delivery to the governor’s office, but didn’t reveal who made the purchase.

Wyoming and Vermont have also reported similar incidents, which has led to the FBI investigation.

The incidents are raising concerns that hackers are taking advantage of low-cost laptops to circumvent digital security and anti-virus controls to infiltrate high-value targets. It’s an intriguing and ingeniously simple idea, provided that they actually take possession of a machine in the supply chain.

The entire idea of having an inside, physical component to a hack is nothing new. Security history is replete with stories of hackers using social engineering techniques to enter buildings to gain access to unsecured workstations, plant bugs and monitoring devices and steal information necessary for remote access.

If you have seen the movies “Hackers,” “Sneakers,” “Mission: Impossible,” “Eraser” and others, with similar plot lines, then you know how this works. While it's possible for people to don janitor and Fedex uniforms to gain access to offices, the most common, cost-effective and likely way of making such an attack is 'Dumpster diving'. Simply, sifting through other people's trash to find discarded clues that may lead to establishing remote access.

Putting malware on a free machine that just shows up in the office, is different and arguably ingenious. Notebook, desktop and hardware costs have shrunk to the point where everyday hackers can afford the investment of buying a dozen for planting in high-value targets and the pay-off would be well worth th eeffort.

The Unwritten Laws of Luddite Technology

What are the Basic Luddite PC Tech Laws?

Let's start with the so-called 'Brains of the Outfit', the 'Nerve Centre' - The PC, Laptop, Mac or 'computer'

• Law 1: For every fix that a Windows Update patch fixes, the update will break two other things on your PC
• Law 2: The risk that Windows will need to automatically install time-sucking critical updates on your PC, is directly proportional to your need to get your PC started
• Law 3: The hard drive always fails just before you were going to back it up.
• Law 4: Your data will get corrupted just before you plug in your new backup external drive or will be corrupted when plugging in your backup device..
• Law 5: Your backup plan is only as good as your last successful restore.
• Law 6: The number of USB ports on your PC or Mac will always be one less than you need at any given time.
• Law 7: Feeling the time pressure on you to fix a computer quickly, will cause you to take longer.
• Law 8: If you close the PC case and tighten all the screws before testing it, it won't work; If you test it before closing the case, it will be OK.

What are The Luddite Tech Support Rules?
Now that you've mastered the basic technology traps, you think you're ready to move on to Tech Support.

• Law 1: If you fix a computer for a friend or family member, you'll be their tech support for life.
• Law 2: If you Build a computer for someone else, then he/she also owns you for life!
• Law 3: Recommend a product that you've used with no problems, and the friend/family member who buys it will immediately descend into some sort of product return hellhole of retribution.
• Law 4: Show any smart or handy IT skills at work, and your company's IT department will start referring all their difficult coworkers to you, the Mr Fixit Guru Guy!
• Law 5: If it's broken and you call tech support, it will immediately fix itself while you're on hold or are still trying to press the correct buttons to get through the responding call centre's phone system.

What are The Luddite Internet Ordinances?
You can find a world of trouble online.

• Law 1: Within a month of agreeing to be "friends" with your boss on Facebook you will regret it, big time.
• Law 2: The crappier the Web site, the sleazier and sketchier the ads.
• Law 3: When entering "Captcha" verification codes on a Web site, you'll always type in the numeral 1 when the site wants a lowercase L, and a capital O when the site wants the number 0.
• Law 4: Just before taking out the boss in a WoW raid, your Internet connection will die.
• Law 5: The difficulty involved in redeeming a rebate is directly proportional to the monetary value of the rebate.
• Law 6: The safe draft of a nasty e-mail, will always somehow find its way to the (unintended) recipient.

What are The Luddite Precepts of Mobile Tech?
Desktop technology isn't the only source of inevitable woe in your life. All those shiny mobile devices can cause pain, too, since the freedom of untethered technology doesn't extend to immunity from rank on rank of frustrating unalterable laws.

We report 10 master Luddite Mobile Laws here.

• Law 1: The charger for your current cell phone will not work with the next cell phone you buy.
• Law 2: Your laptop's charger weighs half of what your laptop weighs and doesn't fit easily into the laptop carry bag.
• Law 3: A laptop battery will drain at twice its normal rate whenever you leave home without your power cord.
• Corollary: Your laptop's battery life is inversely proportional to the amount of work you need to get done on a single charge.
• Law 4: Your iPod or iPhone will be on its last burst of power just as the plane door shuts.
• Law 5: A replacement battery charger will cost 70 percent of the original purchase price of the whole device, including the laptop bag. For phones, the figure is 140 percent!
• Law 6: Your cell phone will inevitably break before your two-year contract is up, forcing you to overpay for a new, less-cool model.
• Law 7: The proprietary charging plug (cost to produce: 50 cents) for your device will disappear within two weeks and will cost you $40 to replace.
• Law 8: On any vacation, a) the memory card for your digital camera will be safely lodged in the card reader on your desk at home. b) The camera's proprietary re-chargeable battery will be dead, with the charger sitting next to the card reader.
• Law 9: A cup of coffee or fizzing drink on your desk, is guaranteed to render your laptop utterly useless.
• Law 10: Your MagSafe adapter will always come unplugged precisely when you need to charge your Mac laptop's battery.

What are The Luddite Software Statutes?
Finally, if entanglements with hardware principles don't leave you bound and gagged, there are always software standards to render you helpless.

• Law 1: Your software provider's online support pages contain explicit instructions for troubleshooting every conceivable problem, except yours.
• Law 2: Nine times out of ten, tinkering with your Registry to fix a system issue will create a new and more severe problem. Did you back it up before you started? Unlikely!
• Law 3: Ten times out of ten, downloading a spyware product will create hidden processes/services more insidious than the original malware/adware encroachment you set out to stop.
• Law 4: The performance increase you can expect from running a Registry cleaner can be calculated as z(n + y), where n is the number of Registry entries cleaned, y is your system CPU's clock speed in gigahertz, and z = 0, or near to it.
• Law 5: The larger the number of people who want your attractive iPhone app, the likelier Apple is to reject it.
• Law 6: iTunes will crash. That's it. No, really.

Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) - Replace or Repair PCs and Laptop

We are all faced with the questions; when to re-invest in our computer equipment and how long should we continue to support obsolete models, given the high cost of support, out-of-warranty repairs and the acquisition /depreciation overheads.

It is especially relevant in these difficult times. The cost of finance is high, to sustain the finance industry and to claw back lost revenue. Whereas, the cost of computer power is dropping and negotiations and deal-making has never been so readily available, in an effort to stay competitive and afloat.

Consolidation versus Growth
The questions are equally relevant if you are trying to dig in and consolidate your resources to protect you from the growing storm or whether you are going for future growth and looking to launch your company with greater capabilities, when times improve or allow. We are all looking for and waiting on, that breakthrough moment.

Costs versus Benefits
Clearly everyone's company is unique and they have particular circumstances to take into consideration but the overall Cost v Benefit argument is similarly simple in most cases. Hopefully the illustrations here will give you some constants in a question of variables.

28% taking smartphones and laptops to bed for work: survey

More than a quarter of 329 London workers surveyed admit they routinely take their laptop or other mobile computing device to bed to do work.

The same survey indicated that 57% of bedmates found it "a very annoying habit."

More than half of those who do work in bed did so for between two to six hours every week, according to the recent survey.

Eight percent of the respondents also confessed to spending more time on their mobile devices during the evening than talking to their partners.

When asked the question, "What is the last thing you do before going to sleep?" 96% did say it was to kiss their partners goodnight. The remaining 4% (71% of whom were male, according to the survey) confessed to completing work and checking e-mail.

According to the survey, more than half of the workers are routinely uploading and downloading sensitive corporate information to their mobile device while in bed, and most are using a wireless network, with a fifth admitting their network was not secure as they tapped away answering e-mail and other tasks.

In a list of five tips that included good admonitions to use encryption, strong passwords and the like, the last tip was: "Use your bedroom for what it's designed for and if you're not feeling sleepy, your laptop is the last thing you should be turning to!"

Do not skimp on replacing old laptops

Your Business may not survive it!
Not replacing laptops can prove very costly. You will need additional service cover against losses and breakdowns, because the warranties have expired, not to mention the lost productivity in using a three year old model. Keep your laptops up to date and in the new budget. If there are cuts to be made then this not the time or the place.

Companies are trying to cope with reduced IT budgets and are postponing the purchase of new laptop computers but they are making a big mistake.

Extending the use of laptops two years beyond the traditional three-year lifetime cost companies an average of $/Euros 1,050 per machine, more than the initial replacement cost.

The additional costs will include a hype in repair costs simply due to old age, normal wear and tear and the end of three-year warranty periods.

For each laptop user that is using the outdated equipment, it costs the company about $/Euros 9,600 in lost worker productivity over the two-year period.

Many companies are keeping a tight control over new purchases because of the recession. Some forward-thinking companies have taken the more positive step of replacing some user laptops with less expensive smartphones or other handheld devices. Such devices can be far more cost-effective for users who are only using laptops to access e-mail.

The replacement of corporate laptops with mobile devices should grow significantly over the next decade. In fact, it is predicted that in less than 10 years, the majority of Internet users will be accessing the Internet via a mobile device instead of a laptop or desktop.

Mobile devices are now being seen as mission critical but organisations are not quite at the point where they are completely confident about replacing laptops with smartphones. They are looking seriously at it and planning to research the potential gains in efficiency.

Four Tele-commuting Security Mistakes

1. Careless use of Wi-Fi and accessing unsecured open networks
2. Letting family and friends use work-issued devices and attaching unauthorised peripherals
   
3. Altering or deleting security settings to view Web sites that have been blocked by the company
4. Leaving a work-issued device in an unsecured place or public location

Security is a good mind-set to adopt

For more information and assistance, speak to your IT Helpdesk and Security personnel . They have a range of proven and tested (approved) tools, which are closely aligned with simple operating procedures and guidelines to help you reduce the potential impact of threats and vulnerabilities. The effective use and implementation of these, is up to you.

Remember to check with the security guys regularly. There is always something new going on in their world that will directly affect your business world.

If in doubt give the Security doctor a shout!

As with most things, it is always easier to find security issues and threats before they escalate into a crisis. A mild infection can be treated quickly and effectively if brought to their attention early but, if left untreated, there is always the risk of cross-infection to other members of staff, with the potential loss of a limb or vital organ.

In your business world, it is your server, applications and your data that keeps you alive! You don't want to lose any of these or even break the arterial chain that holds them together.

Lock-up your dockers

A laptop is stolen every 53 seconds, and 97 percent are never recovered!

Worse, one out of every 10 laptops will be stolen within the first 12 months of purchase!

Will you be next?

All of your family photos, tax return files, bank statements, etc. at risk. Not to mention all those usernames and passwords that you auto-saved somewhere. You say something must be done.

If you manage a business or work in a corporate environment, the cost will be even steeper than just replacing hardware: think of the public relations nightmare from the theft and legal requirement to alert employees and clients about the information breach.

According to some expert sources, the cost to a company can total €197 per missing record when factoring in the loss of customers, legal fees and the PR crisis management quelling efforts.

Clearly, a few thousand records can quickly add up.

“The loss of a laptop computer may well be quite expensive if it contains unencrypted confidential data,” according to the 2008 CSI Computer Crime and Security Survey. In 2008, 42 percent of all corporate security incidents were because of a stolen laptop, second only to viruses and insider abuse.

Babies can't do an adult's job

Walking by the netbook display at PC World, Media Markt and others, you're likely to hear cooing and exclamations of how cute the little baby laptops are.

Beware, if you take one home, your new baby is not yet fully grown and it is barely on solids. It has not built up enough of the resources to do the work that a standard Momma and Poppa notebook or Laptop can do. Its got some growing to do.

Cheeky new Netbooks are just about the only thing these days that are generating any kind of excitement in the hardware market space. The visual appearance and form factor is appealing to many. The idea of having a good workhorse laptop that can carry your workload at half the size and weight is a dream, but I am sorry it has yet to come true.

With a 10-inch screen, these babies are much smaller than the standard-sized notebook, and yes, much lighter. They are also quite a bit cheaper too. Some are as inexpensive as €200, while others can get as expensive as the €1,000 range. Take note, there is a good reason why they are cheaper.

It's hard to walk by a netbook display at a consumer electronics store without hearing someone coo-ing at them and talk about how cute they are, as if they really were little baby notebooks.

Their magnetic appeal to consumers, means that netbooks have been doing their part to boost sales and make PC manufacturers happy. If you look at the earnings report of any PC maker who makes netbooks, you'll notice that netbook unit sales are just about the only thing growing at a healthy pace. This year other hardware sales look positively bleak, with Gartner now forecasting a decline of almost 12 percent in 2009, the worst in IT history.

Although netbook sales seem to be increasing, some in the industry say that netbooks are suffering a greater return rate than other PCs. If that is the case we can predict an increase in th enumber of netbook orphanages opening up. Netbook for sale. 1 disappointed owner!

• On the consumer side, it's said that once users get the machines home and play with them for a little while, they soon realize the smaller machines can't do all the things that their more Momma and Papa (standard-sized and standard-priced) notebooks can do. The very inexpensive netbooks generally come with Linux, an well respected operating system in the techie world but still a little unfamiliar to the Microsoft masses.
  
• On the enterprise side distributors say netbooks have yet to take hold.

So what's the real story? Can that little baby PC do the big jobs you need it to do? Is there a place anywhere for the netbook in 2009? Is it a serious business contender? Consider this;

Screen size. The size really negates th eus eof Windows style operating systems because you only have space for 1 window. Do your users want to run multiple applications and have more than 1 window open at one time? Do they use spreadsheets? Well, while the netbook's small form factor makes it convenient to tote around, but you will not be able to see everything you need to see. Certainly not at the same time and that can get very frustrating.

Storage. To save space, most netbooks are shipped with a small amount of solid state memory rather than a rotating hard drive. This makes sense in a world where memory prices are always falling and solid state, is faster and more reliable. However, many users have become accustomed to more than 100GB of memory and even in netbooks with hard drives, those users may be disappointed.

Processor performance. You would be foolish to buy a PC that isn't dual core, at least. That is, unless your looking at a netbook. Most standard notebooks come with a dual core processor, either from Intel or AMD, but most netbooks use Intel's Atom single core processor. Intel has said that Atom processors have about half the performance of Intel Celeron processors. Party on!

The other features you and your customers have gotten used to have also been downsized or bypassed. You can get the Microsoft Vista Premium OS on some of these notebooks, and you can buy an external DVD player and an additional external hard drive but by the time you have financed that, you could have configured a standard Momma and Poppa low-end laptop that comes with a higher-performance processor.

Some companies are coming out with some interesting new innovative netbooks, including ones with an ARM processor and a detachable keyboard, making it appear more like a tablet notebook.

In Summary. Unless you want what the netbook really is (a lightweight client that functions well in a cloud computing environment for tasks such as e-mail and Web browsing, but is not as capable of heavy lifting) you are probably better off with a standard Momma and Poppa notebook for a few euros more.

If you want something cute and cuddly around the office that can be easily picked up and taken anywhere, there are other more appropriate and interesting things.