Having completed developing and testing a deployment procedure, I am pleased to make available to my customers a brand new service offering: Full Disk Encryption for laptops.
The Federal Trade Commission estimates that as many as 9 million Americans have their identities stolen each year, and that identity theft is the fastest growing crime in the nation.
If your laptop was lost or stolen, the new “owner” could have unrestricted access to view all your private documents, email, pictures, and could even gain access to financial accounts. Your ordinary system login passwords (if you use them) afford you no real protection and only a false sense of security; an unscrupulous individual can bypass Windows passwords and BIOS passwords by simply detaching the drive and connecting it as an external data drive to another computer, rendering all its contents completely visible.
There is a simple and effective countermeasure that protects you against this serious privacy risk, rendering your confidential data totally useless to any unauthorized party who gets their hands on it. Yet not nearly enough users leverage this crucial security capability.
Full Disk Encryption (FDE) is software (or hardware) which encrypts every bit of data that goes on a disk, from start to end, automatically, transparently, in real-time. You choose a password that unlocks the encryption, which must be entered whenever starting up the computer. Without the correct password, the contents of the disk are rendered completely useless to any thief, effectively a mass of random data.
Note that this is a much more robust level of security than an ordinary startup password. The data on the disk is stored encrypted at all times and at no time is unencrypted data written to the disk. A low level driver layer intervenes between the disk and the rest of the operating system, to whose point of view the disk is just ordinary unencrypted storage.
I have deployed an industry standard Full Disk Encryption software solution for the protection of my own systems, including not only laptops but also external storage devices. I am using it every day and finding it to be reliable, mature, optimized, and to cause essentially imperceptible (e.g. no) performance impact.
I am recommending all users of portable laptop and notebook computers to contact me to set up an appointment to have this vital security capability expertly installed to your systems. Don’t risk a data breach that could make you the victim of identity theft or the leakage of your personal documents and files to prying eyes. Even if you don’t have anything “important” on your computer, why allow some rogue individual the pleasure of viewing your personal documents, pictures, and email? Lock them out with Full Disk Encryption.