Control Engineering

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How many company laptops go missing?
May 31, 2007

Here's an interesting statistic: The U.S. Department of Energy reports that from 2001 to the present, it has lost 1,415 laptop computers from its inventory of 71,874. That's just shy of 2% of the total.

Let's say for the sake of argument that DOE employees are more or less a cross section of the working population that has a laptop computer. If they are typical, you can expect that 1 in every 50 computers will disappear, taking all its data with it. Is there critical data on your computer? Could an enthusiastic hacker sit down with your laptop and find out interesting things about your control systems and other business data? Give that some thought.

The article linked above says that managers now must watch who has what much more closely, and report missing equipment more quickly. Who knows, there might even be penalties enacted for those who can't quite remember where they left it.

Posted by Peter Welander on May 31, 2007 | Comments (0)