Re: In light of what has happened with the theft of the VA laptop, what are the "best practices" for securing laptops?

["Brian Daniel Beck" <beckbria () msu edu>]

Mike Foster writes: 

> In light of what has happened with the theft of the VA laptop, what are the "best practices" for securing laptops?  Am curious how all of you feel about the options. 
>
> How do  you feel and/or what is your experience with:
> --Power-on passwords in the hardware/CMOS/BIOS Setup
> --Hard drive locking passwords in the hardware/CMOS/BIOS Setup
> --Laptops equipped with fingerprint readers for the above two options
> --Windows NTFS EFS encryption
> --TrueCrypt from www.truecrypt.org for encrypted storage areas
> --Trusted Platform Module (TPM) https://www.trustedcomputinggroup.org
> --Tokens that plug into USB
> --Others? 
>
> Thank you in advance... 

Any of those to a degree can help, but I think the key point isn't any sort 
of access restriction on the laptop.  They key point is to leave sensitive 
data on the server.  No one should ever have to take things like credit card 
numbers or social security numbers home.  Heck, I'm trying to think of a 
reason that such information should ever be stored locally on a user machine 
at all.