BIOS

Laptops and USB flash drives represent a significant risk of theft. The trick is not to prevent physical access—that has already been compromised. The truly tech-savvy and law enforcement will recover the data, one way or another. The following are some methods of securing these ubiquitous portable devices:

• The first line of defense on a laptop is a BIOS boot password. Be careful if you use this method. On a PC, you simply park the password jumper, boot, set the password to what you want, engage the password jumper, and go about your day. Where are the jumpers on a laptop? So, be careful if you use passwords in the BIOS of a laptop.

• BitLocker prevents access to drives even if they are removed from the computer. It is native only on Enterprise and Ultimate editions of Windows Vista and Windows 7 and Winodws Server 2008.