Holiday Travel: Ways to Keep Your Laptop, Privacy Safe

If you're planning on traveling with your laptop this holiday season, you might want to travel prepared. The statistics are overwhelmingly bad: According to Gartner, one laptop is stolen every 53 seconds.

[ MORE ON CIO.com Lax Laptop Security at the Airport: How Not to Become a Statistic; 8 Laptop Bags That Will Help You Speed Through Airport Security; Lax Laptop Security Can Be Dangerous...and Expensive ]

U.S. airports, in particular, have become black holes for business travelers' laptops: 12,000 laptops are lost at U.S. airports every week, and 70 percent of those laptops, which good Samaritans and airport employees return to lost-and-found departments, are never reclaimed, reported the Ponemon Institute.

Increased security measures have created longer checkpoint lines and a more stressful environment. More than 70 percent of business travelers feel rushed when trying to get on their flights, noted the Ponemon research, and 60 percent worry that delays due to security checkpoints will cause them to miss their flight. It's not surprising, then, that according to U.S airport representatives, the most common airport locations where laptops are lost or missing include security checkpoints (40 percent) and departure gates (23 percent), the Ponemon report found. (See "8 Laptop Bags That Will Help You Speed Through Airport Security" to help make your travels more efficient.)

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