Effectiveness of Physical, Social and Digital Mechanisms against Laptop Theft in Open Organizations

Organizations rely on physical, digital and social mechanisms to protect their IT systems. Of all IT systems, laptops are probably the most troublesome to protect, since they are easy to remove and conceal. When the thief has physical possession of the laptop, it is also difficult to protect the data inside. In this study, we look at the effectiveness of the security mechanisms against laptop theft in two universities. The study considers the physical and social protection of the laptops. We analyze the logs from laptop thefts in both universities and complement the results with penetration tests. The results from the study show that the effectiveness of security mechanisms from the physical domain is limited, and it depends mostly from the social domain. The study serves as a motivation to further investigate the analysis of the alignment of the mechanisms across all three security domains to protect the IT assets in an organization.