Seeing how i work for a big company, every now and then i get informed that i have to take a corporate mandated on-line lesson (pronounced "Corporate CYA") that highlights some aspect that someone feels should be highlighted.
The tests are overwhelmingly annoying and feel like watching a filmstrip about "Our Friend, Mr. Hygiene" while being presented with options that still require you to do everything in order. i've gotten fairly good at figuring out the fastest way to "take this class" and via a combination of middle click tabs and the text version, inevitably have my "100%" score within five to seven minutes of starting the 40 minute session.
The latest one was on "Privacy and Security" which told me important life lessons like don't mail porn to your manager, steal stuff from websites, or do anything to offend the RIAA. (And no, i'm not making any of that up.)
Still while i was waiting for some of the lessons to load, i did take a few moments to actually make my laptop a bit more secure.
i've got a 2GB TrueCrypt partition set up, so it was pretty simple to move the important stuff onto it. That means SSH keys, Firefox profiles and temporary files and mail archives. Why that stuff? Well, because when your laptop gets stolen, the first thing the bad guys are going to do is boot up a stand alone CD and pull all that content off of it so they can steal your passwords, identity and anything else they can. Toss that stuff in a big encrypted file and they've just got a laptop.
2GB may seem small, but it can hold a surprising amount. i've got well over 90% of my locker disk open.
(By the way, it's really easy to move your profiles to another disk. Just copy your "%HOMEPATH%/Application/Mozilla/Firefox/Profiles/" to
the new directory, and modify profiles.ini to show:
[Profile0]
Name=default
IsRelative=0
#Path=Profiles\original profile name
Path=new path\Profiles\original profile name
i like to comment out the original, relative path line to act as a safeguard. Make sure you set the IsRelative flag to "0" otherwise Mozilla will get confused. If you use Thunderbird, the process is pretty much the same. Obviously, if you use something else, go check your docs on how to do it. If you can't, change your browser/email client.
Obviously, you want to add a TrueCrypt startup link to the top of the Start Up group so that it starts before other programs. You also want to make sure that the password you use to secure that file is strong (mixed case with numbers and symbols is a good idea). i'll also add that i've become a huge fan of Hibernate for my laptop.
Security doesn't have to be a pain in the butt to you, but it should be living hell for the bad guys.
