Losing a laptop costs your company a lot more than just the lost hardware...think of the data that is on that PC. Now think about how many laptops you have in your enterprise and potential that there is for data breaches. Yeah, it is staggering - isn't it?!

Join us for the Securing Your Environment with Intel Anti-Theft Technology webinar on Tuesday, June 23 2009 to learn more about the impact of data breaches and how Intel Anti-Theft Technology can help you strengthen your PC hardware and security solutions.

Our panelists include Dr. Larry Ponemon, Mike Schulien, and Geoff Glave:

• Dr. Larry Ponemon, Chairman and Founder of the Ponemon Institute, will share information from his annual study on the cost of data breaches; the associated financial impacts to business, the threat of customer turnover as well as preventative solutions. The Ponemon institutue is a research “think tank” dedicated to advancing privacy and data protection practices. Click here to read the study.

• Intel Solution Architect, Mike Schulien, will discuss how Intel’s latest security innovation, Intel® Anti-Theft Technology, can combat security breaches by strengthening PC hardware and security solutions.  This new hardware-level technology will shut down a PC and/or its data if it is lost or stolen with the ability to reactivate it if it is recovered.

• Geoff Glave, Absolute Software Product Manager, will talk about how IT administrators can use Computrace, Absolute’s leading IT asset-management and security solution, to secure their assets remotely, automatically locking down a system quickly in case of theft or suspicious circumstances. Computrace technology is the leading security service now using Intel® Anti-Theft Technology. Computrace with Intel® Anti-Theft Technology Whitepaper

Logistics

Date: June 23, 2009

Time: 9:00 am PDT

Registration: https://www2.gotomeeting.com/register/217766930

And of course, what's an Intel Anti Theft announcement without Josh's stellar surfing video?

Importance of protecting company data has led to the advent of various types of encryption solutions being deployed in the companies IT environments. One interesting question that comes to mind is if all of the company data that could potentially reside in different types of devices e.g. Desktops/Laptops/Smartphones etc. need to be encrypted? The answer to this question may need to take into account numerous considerations including security risk analysis, cost, management overhead etc.

Considering only laptops and desktops – we have observed that laptop encryption is more prevalent as compared to desktops. The two major questions then are 1) what reasons prevent enterprises from encrypting desktops?; 2) what reasons would motivate encryption of data in desktops?

Disadvantages of encrypting desktops

1)      Lack of security need due to low risk of theft – It may be less likely, given the physical and other security measures deployed in a company, that the physical desktops are stolen from the company premises

2)      Manageability costs and maintenance – Admins have to manage additional user credentials, increased helpdesk calls and also recovery of encrypted data is hard.

3)      Trend towards using stateless devices and virtual desktops

Advantages of encrypting desktops

1)      Insider Threat – Disgruntled employees stealing data from within the enterprise premises. Most desktops have bigger storage capabilities than laptops

2)      Regulatory Compliances require encryption of all devices

3)      Multi-User Machine- If there are multiple users that are using a common desktop and one of them happens to be malicious then encryption helps protect the data from such users.

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Hello vPro Experts,

In case you've worked with any of the Powershell code samples I've previously posted, you've probably noticed that the AmtSystem.Connect() method executes asynchronously, and returns immediately. In this case, you'd have to develop some sort of loop in order to determine whether or not the connection was successful. Typically, I would just use this code to prevent a script from continuing before the connection was established:

while ($amtdevice.State -eq "Connecting") { Start-Sleep 1 }

But that's ugly, because, what happens if it never connects? Although it's nice to have the ability to asychronously connect to AMT devices, writing code and understanding the logic, to handle async processes is significantly more difficult than writing code that is synchronous. For this reason, we will look at how to modify and recompile the ManageabilityStack .NET assembly in the Intel AMT Developer Toolkit (DTK) to allow synchronous connections to AMT from PowerShell code.

In order to perform the next steps, you'll need the following:

• The Intel AMT DTK source code
• Microsoft Visual Studio 2008 (the Express edition is fully functional and free!)
• Microsoft Windows PowerShell 1.0 or 2.0 CTP3

Once you've installed these components, continue on:

1. Download the Intel AMT DTK source code and extract to a folder
2. Navigate to <Source>\Manageability Stack and open the Manageability Stack.csproj file in Visual Studio 2008
3. Open the AmtSystem.cs file in the Visual Studio Solution Explorer
4. Rename the Connect() method to ConnectAsync()
5. Copy the following code above the ConnectAsync() method:
   public void Connect()
   {
      if (State != AmtSystemObjState.Disconnected) return;
      ChangeState(AmtSystemObjState.Connecting);
      ConnectEx(this);
   }
6. In the Visual Studio Solution Explorer, right-click the Manageability Stack project, and click Build
7. Go to your <Source>\Manageability Stack\obj\Debug folder, and grab your new ManageabilityStack.dll .NET assembly

Now that you have a recompiled ManageabilityStack assembly, you can load this into PowerShell, and connect synchronously using the Connect() method!

Update: I attached the AmtSystem.cs file to this blog post, if you're not comfortable modifying source code yourself! You'll still need to replace the file, open the project, and recompile the library though

Trevor Sullivan

Systems Engineer

OfficeMax Corporation