Legal Implications of staff using WiFi

This could be an issue for some of us.

[Receptional]

A story from silicon [software.silicon.com]

The country's hotels and waiting rooms are full of people rummaging through the contents of each others' laptops.

I can believe it. Doesn't matter what you do internally - if an employee takes his laptop out of the office, and connects, he better be aware that he could be compromised I guess.

The story is all about the legal implications, but is there an easy way to configure poeple's laptops so that it is very difficult for them to compromise themsleves through WiFi? I confess I do not know enough about the technology, but it seems to me that legal contracts warning employees about the danger are a poor substitute for a technological solution here.

[Brett_Tabke]

Yes, setup a VPN. It is an encrypted data connection between the remote and the host. All the sniffing in the world isn't going to crack it...

[JKMitchell]

Set up some firewall software on every laptop? This may not be the best solution but it will reduce a lot of problems.

For what it's worth, at a recent exhibition my firewall software logged 55 attempts at accesses during a 10 hour period that the exhibition was taking place. Not many I grant you, and my laptop is only used for exhibitions and presentations with data being removed each time, but even so...