Most of us can admit to having lost a pair of sunglasses or an important business card during our busy daily business lives. How about a cell phone, smartphone or other digital PDA that, for whatever reason was never recovered?

Expect it to be a common occurrence; probably as common as the lost pair of sunglasses. As personal devices become more numerous in shape, size and functionality, they will become a part of us. And until that happens quite literally, we stand the chance at leaving a part of ourselves behind at the cafe', newsstand and while taking advantage of public transportation.

Quite possibly you will only lose your list of contacts, easily restored to a new device from your PC back at the office. Sometimes more confidential information will be lost, or even stolen, and it may remain unknown to you for quite some time if somebody will use their ill-gotten gains in a criminal manner. While the device is in your possession, what can you do to protect it, and yourself?

To start, device lock the unit with a very strong master password. This is the highest level tamper protection for the unit itself, and all personal devices have this or a similar ability. If your device doesn't, reconsider its worth.

Your contact information is confidential, and may be saved to the unit's SIM chip instead of a removable memory card. In additional to a master device lock, enable SIM chip lock/PIN as well. This will prevent somebody from simply removing your SIM chip and placing/viewing it in another similar PDA or smartphone.

Keep in mind, however, that it is only a matter of time before somebody determined enough to view the contents of your device will brute force crack the password. But protecting it with a password that is difficult to guess could provide the time you need to remotely disable the device.

"Secure" encryption methods provide even greater security, but have also been shown to have a limited useable lifetime. With that said, personal files on personal devices can and should be encrypted. Following the theory that an encrypted file becomes less valuable over time; you protect critical personal data from potential attack for long enough until it worthless. An example of this is protecting credit card and account information long enough for you to find a phone and cancel the account.

Net-net: Expect to lose your PDA at some point. To protect against the effects of the loss, use the master password protection of the device, as well as password protection mechanisms used in other mobile applications, to your greatest advantage. Along the same line of thinking, use file encryption.

Next Page: What else can you do to actively protect your device?

About the Auhtor
Shane Coursen, Senior Technology Consultant at Kaspersky Lab, has held lead virus researcher positions with all of the major anti-virus players through the past five years, holding senior-level virus research positions since 1996. He has published industry-related articles and presented at a number of national and international anti-virus conferences.