You can never be too careful, goes an old saying. Or, apparently, too paranoid.
That’s the healthy attitude many corporate officials should adopt when they travel out of the country, according to this report from Cnet on corporate espionage.
Encrypting your hard drive? Not enough. Using multiple passwords? Not enough. Read this and get the paranoid juices really flowing when you step one foot beyond our borders.
How serious a problem is it? In July, Canada’s electronic spooks published two Web pages of advice to federal IT security managers to pass on to travelling bureaucrats, and a third aimed at the private sector.
(Computer security image from Shutterstock)
The Web pages come from Communications Security Establishment Canada, the country’s code-making and code-breaking agency. One of its roles is to protect the electronic data toted around by bureaucrats and politicians.
The pages for federal IT security managers list best practices, which can be boiled down to this: If you’re travelling to a high risk country — and it doesn’t define high risk, but presumably it means a country with an advanced intelligence agency or one where there’s risk of being kidnapped — take a temporary laptop or smart phone with a wiped memory and as little data on it as possible.
Then there are the standard things: Make sure firewalls and anti-malware are up to date, turn off Wi-Fi and Bluetooth, and change passwords before and after travel. In fact, the CSEC has 35 mitigation measures you can size up here.
And what does Ottawa recommend for the private sector? Rule one is never let the device out of your sight. If you have to, take the battery and SIM card with you. Click here and find out more.