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After Airport Stop, Kevin Mitnick Shares Travel Tips
Doug Caverly
Staff Writer
2008-10-01
 Insider Reports RSS Feed
The next time you have to take off your shoes and belt at an airport, keep in mind that things could be much worse. You might get detained and questioned for four hours, for example, which is something hacker-turned-security-consultant Kevin Mitnick recently experienced on a return trip from Colombia.
 | | After Airport Stop, Kevin Mitnick Shares Travel Tips |  |
People and companies needn't worry too much that Mitnick's fallen back to the proverbial dark side; accusations weren't really made, and charges were never brought. As told by Elinor Mills, his detainment instead seems like a cautionary tale about wrongful accusations and the defensive measures traveling computer owners should take.
Mills writes, "Agents from the Immigrations Customs Enforcement arrived to question him. They asked why he was in Atlanta and he told them; he was there to moderate a panel at a security conference sponsored by the American Society for Industrial Security. Asked for proof, he fired up a laptop to show them the itinerary in his e-mail. But when he clicked 'yes' to have Firefox clear his private data--an automatic response to a default setting--the agents snatched the laptop away from him, thinking he was deleting evidence."
So be careful about every click and keystroke, for one thing. Otherwise, "To protect his privacy and that of his clients, Mitnick encrypts all the confidential data on his laptops, transmits it over the Internet for storage on servers in the U.S., and wipes it from the computer before returning from any international trips, just in case officials decide to search or seize his equipment. He also encrypts his hard drive. And now, he says he is going to keep a 'clone' of his MacBook at home so he will have an exact duplicate of it if it is ever seized."
Depending on what sort of stuff you keep on your computers - and whether or not laws about laptop searches are changed - these steps may be worth imitating. The average business traveler isn't as likely to get stopped as Kevin Mitnick, of course, but the story seemed worth relating.
About the Author:
Doug is a staff writer for SecurityProNews. InternetFinancialNews, SearchNewz, and WebProNews.
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