New laptop? 5 things to keep you secure

As part of our consumer-focused series for the Evening Standard, we look at 5 simple things to help keep you more secure when you buy a new laptop.

New laptop? We all know about the importance of a secure password, but there are other things to consider to make your computer safe. It doesn’t matter whether you’re a Mac or a Windows user, these are the five things you should always do.

1) Install an Antivirus

Adding antivirus software to our laptops is like setting up alarms in our house. For Windows users there is some in-built protection with Microsoft’s “Windows Defender”, but it doesn’t yet measure up to even the free antivirus software available.

If you’ve got a Mac, there are more stringent processes already in place on your laptop, limiting the possibility for viruses and ransomware to take hold. That said, the Mac Operating System doesn’t come with an Antivirus utility, and more threats are popping up each year, so do make sure you install antivirus software – future you will be thankful.

2) Install a trusted VPN

This is another must. Whenever you’re out and about, whether in a coffee shop, airport or on the train, there is always a risk when using public or shared WIFI networks. Trusted VPN providers will help you encrypt your data, maintain your privacy and help you browse securely.

Always make sure you choose one with a “no logging policy”, meaning it doesn’t record what sites you browse or files you download. Also, the best will only collect the minimum information about you as a customer to provide their service (e.g. email, username and payment information).

3) Keep your laptop up to date

Microsoft and Apple, alongside many of the other companies that make the software we use every day, have “bug bounty” programmes, where ethical hackers submit exploits they find to help companies patch them, in exchange for a cash bounty.

These companies have their own testing teams which work tirelessly to discover potential vulnerabilities and figure out ways to fix them, before frequently pushing them out to all of us. As soon as we buy a new laptop, it’s so important for us to immediately update it, and then turn on automatic updates so we always have access to the latest security fixes from these manufacturers. The bottom line is: don’t wait, update.

4) Encrypt your hard drive

The more we use our laptops, the more personal data we keep on there; everything from a medical report from a recent surgery or IVF treatment to photos and personal information about our children and parents. This encodes and locks the information on your laptop. For Macs, there is ‘FileVault’, while ‘Bitlocker’ is for Windows.

This means that even if someone managed to steal our laptop from the coffee shop table, or from our home office during a burglary, our information has another layer of protection, appearing as code if the thief tried to read it.

Small business owners may use personal computers for business purposes. If this computer is storing even something as simple as customer information on them – which is subject to GDPR rules – a breach could mean both fines and reputational damage.

5) Don’t forget your old laptop

Don’t forget to wipe all your data from your old laptop. At a minimum, you can do a system reset, but this won’t stop the most determined users from being able to read what you had on your laptop.

In the advanced Reset options on Windows, you can choose to overwrite your data with zeroes. For Mac you can choose the ‘seven pass erase’, which wipes and then writes other data to your hard disk seven times over, further obfuscating any remnants of what you originally stored. If in doubt, wipe it out!

The future will see advanced biometrics, advanced threat detection at a network level (stopping things before they even reach you) and more security in the design of the hardware which sits inside our laptops. But even then, we cannot be ‘hands-off’; whether we like it or not, security is all of our responsibilities.

Originally published in the Evening Standard