Monday surprises

I guess there’s something else I’ll have to check for whenever our pool laptops get returned. Normally that’s a time to do AV updates, patching, etc. After today I’m going to have to check and make sure all the software is still installed!

I had a visit early this morning from someone who had taken one of the laptops for the weekend with a complaint that it wouldn’t work, he couldn’t find anyway to connect to our network. A quick inspection led us to discovered the reason for that. Someone had uninstalled the VPN client! (And the firewall for that matter.)

I guess the firewall and/or VPN client was interfering with whatever they wanted to do so they solved that problem by just uninstalling them.

So either I’m going to have to start checking for that or we’re going to have to look at something like the Shared Computer Toolkit to lock down certain things in XP while still allowing users to configure wireless network settings, or install thumb drives, etc. We tried once to make them limited users but it didn’t work out very well. There’s simply too many environment variables that our folks run into on the road that require higher security level to accommodate.

Tags: Laptops, Security

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One Comment

  1. lol – that is pretty funny and unexpected. Shame you have to wait for windows to load and login before you can finish with the pc.
    Currently we just check that all the hardware is there when the user comes back (with mice/memory key etc) but still find times that users just dump laptops off without logging them back in again.

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