Keep those workstations locked

Everyone in IT knows who you don’t leave your workstation unlocked when you leave your desk.  It’s because your co-workers will send fart jokes to the boss from your machine as punishment.  However there are actual security reasons for not leaving your machine unlocked.

When you leave your workstation unlocked you are giving anyone that walks by access to everything on your computer.  Your email, access to the company intranet, etc.  Anything that you have access to without entering a username and password (or that has a saved username and password) they have access to.

Have iTunes installed on your work computer with a credit card saved in it so you can grab the new song that just came out?  So do they.  They could download 10,000 songs on your account and you wouldn’t know it until the next time you opened iTunes or checked your credit card statement.  (I’m assuming that iTunes will save your credit card, I don’t actually use it but you get the idea.)

Have usernames and passwords saved in your browser so you can easily log into various websites like your bank, credit cards, forums, etc?  So does anyone who sits at your computer.

You are probably sitting there thinking to your self, if some strange person was sitting at my desk, someone would notice.  They might, but probably not.  Lots of times I’ve had strange people sitting in my chair waiting for me with no one around to question them.

If you have an office, you aren’t exempt.  Yes I know that you lock your office door at night.  Look around your office, do you have a trash can sitting in there somewhere?  Do you use it?  Is it empty in the morning?  The magic trash can fairy doesn’t clean out your trash.  Someone who makes way to little money to clean up after the slobs in the office (sorry I’m projecting a little here, or depending on your office maybe I’m not) comes in and cleans it out and dusts your desk off.  You know how they get in, either they have a key or the guards open the doors for them.

I know that one company I worked at everyone who had an office would be gone by 7pm.  At about 9pm the security guards would come around and unlock every single office from the lowest manager to the highest C level exec.  I know this because I worked swing there as a Database Engineer for several years (pretty much every department except for Marketing was staffed 24×7 365 days a year).  After the guards would open the offices the cleaning crew would come through and clean all the offices, empty the trash, etc.  Some offices had a window to the inside of the building, some didn’t.  Most had blinds that could be closed for privacy.  Lost of people had only a laptop, many were left at the office on weeknights, and many people had a desktop.  I would say that 80% of offices had a computer in them at night.

How hard would it be for an outside person to pay someone from the cleaning crew $5000 to get them to copy some data to a USB drive, or infect the network with a virus?  That’s probably more than most people on the cleaning crew make in a month for just a few minutes of work.  To most people, especially in this economy this would probably be to much money to pass up.

If a competitor (or an employee for that matter) wanted access to data that was private, and we didn’t have a policy in place to automatically lock the computers, it would have been a piece of cake for someone to sit at a desk and download all sorts of confidential data from the persons computer.  All without anyone knowing about it.

Fortunately at this company we had a policy which required the computers to lock them selves, but many smaller companies don’t enable this feature for one reason or another.

If your computer isn’t locked when you get to work in the morning I urge you to talk to your IT staff and have them enable auto-locking on the company computers.  It’s a slight annoyance to have to unlock your computer in the morning, but it’s much better than having someone walk in and simply take all your personal and corporate data.

Denny