Earlier this week, Premier Healthcare, a Bloomington, Indiana-based healthcare provider, reported a data breach that could affect over 200,000 people after a thief stole a laptop containing patient information. While the laptop had password protection, it wasn’t encrypted.
While the bulk of data breaches making the news are the result of phishing or hacks, a large percentage of breaches are caused by straightforward stealing. And while, in this instance, the laptop was taken from a secured onsite billing area (suggesting forethought), many thefts are simply opportunistic — a crash and grab of a laptop left on a car seat, for example.
Whether your company laptops store sensitive healthcare information, private information helpful to identity thieves, or proprietary client information, you need to be prepared to limit exposure in the case of theft.
When a laptop is stolen, you probably worry about these three things right away:
- What sensitive corporate information is on the laptop?
- What corporate systems might be vulnerable to hacking from the laptop?
- How do we get the miserable miscreant who took stole the laptop???????
Is that last question just me? Even if you’re not as vengeful as I am, Kaseya has your back even under these most dire circumstances.
Wipe Corporate Data Clean
With Kaseya VSA, you can take control of the laptop even though it is (clearly) off your corporate network. Log into the device remotely with Live Control and wipe any sensitive data from the device, quickly limiting exposure. You can also take advantage of remote management capability with mobile devices such as tablets and smart phones. You can segregate corporate info from personal info on any BYOD devices to allow quick access without disturbing personal data
Enhance Systems’ Security
Kaseya’s AuthAnvil delivers two ways to protect corporate systems from illicit entry. In our example, you can quickly change the user’s passwords through simple and powerful password management. Even better, AuthAnvil’s multi-factor authentication makes sure that anyone trying to log into corporate systems needs more than just a password. This way, your systems are protected even before you are alerted of the theft.
Fight Crime
While Kaseya helps you protect corporate data and systems, wouldn’t it be nice to catch the bad guy? You can by creating procedures that automatically capture desktop screenshots and even pinpoint the geographic location of a laptop using Google location APIs. More than one Kaseya customer has used these capabilities when working with local authorities. One laptop thief was caught while updating his Facebook account in a coffee shop.
Just this week, another customer was able to send police to the location of their stolen laptop. The user wasn’t the thief but someone who had bought the stolen laptop. However, this incident was related to a series of robberies, and the police were able to use this lead to track down and arrest the thief.
Managing IT systems isn’t always about fighting crime this directly, of course. Learn about powerful automation that Kaseya enables to help you improve protection for your corporate data, systems and devices in other way by downloading this complete Automation Cheat Sheet.
