Last November, we posted about a potential issue with the Mac 10.6.5 (or later) upgrade process and PGP Whole Disk Encryption 10.0.X. Since then, Symantec has provided both a workaround and hotfix to address the client problem encountered with PGP Whole Disk Encryption when updating Mac OS X. A maintenance release that will proactively address this issue is now available.

Symantec has released PGP Whole Disk Encryption 10.1.1 for Mac OS X. After installation of this update, PGP customers can safely update their OS version to Mac OS X 10.6.5 (or later).

For more information on this maintenance release, refer to the post on Symantec’s Encryption Blog.

Complete instructions for how to successfully update to 10.6.5 can be found in this Knowledgebase article.

Malcolm Harkins is Chief Information Security Officer, Intel Corporation.

Recently, I sat down with several other IT security experts and reporters to provide context to a study of the nagging and, as it turns out, incredibly expensive problem of missing laptop PCs. The study found that the odds of having your laptop lost or stolen are as high as 1 in 10.  This won’t surprise many CISOs who regularly field reports of laptops vanishing at airports, customer conference rooms, homes and through shattered car windows.  Likely most would be shocked at the cost.  The 300 companies shared a $2.1 billion bill by and large to cover the ramifications from potentially compromised information on the hard drives.

There was one stat, however, that really stunned me – 70 percent of those companies do nothing to protect their laptops and data.  No encryption.  No back-up.  No antitheft technologies.

There’s a gap between the security organization and business unit when it comes to protecting sensitive data. Security teams can find the data, but it gets tougher to figure out what’s at greatest risk and who needs to fix it. And just tossing a list of files that contain confidential information to the business folks isn’t useful; they need to know which ones matter most and how to easily fix them. Take into account the increasing threats from outside and inside the organization and bridging this gap looks more and more important. Not doing so, could be costly particularly in terms of your most valuable assets, your intellectual property.

In my last post, I talked about how intellectual property is more sought after than ever. Forrester Research says that proprietary knowledge and corporate secrets are on average twice as valuable as customer data, so really it’s no wonder – thieves are now seeing the financial value of IP.