Wet laptop

 

Picture from author's collection

Last night my daughter (14) came to me: "Dad, my screen is not working." She has a separate screen in her room for her laptop. According to the old adage check cables first I checked that both ends of the cable were in place. I then grabbed another HDMI cable to find out if her cable might be the culprit. No result.

She came home just before the end of the world yesterday (it's been quite stormy here), so I asked if her things had gotten wet. Well, not really, only the cap had come off her water bottle in the bag. But luckily that water bottle was empty. She thought.

I opened the laptop and immediately saw that something was wrong: it was damp in several places. First I took out the battery and patted the damp spots dry with tissues, and I gave the HDMI port the same treatment. The speakers also had to be dried, because no sound came out of the laptop, as my daughter reported reluctantly. I loosened quite a few screws in order to reach several spots. That I dare to do so, I owe largely to a colleague, with whom I once went to a computer fair a long time ago, where we bought individual parts and then put together a PC ourselves.

It’s been said one should put a telephone that has fallen into the toilet or into the sea in a bag of rice, because the rice absorbs the moisture. I hesitated for a moment whether I would give the laptop such a treatment, but decided against it because I was afraid that the rice grains would get stuck in various places and that didn't seem like a good addition to the hardware. Instead, I grabbed the hair dryer and worked the guts of the laptop on a low setting—for both heat and blowing power.

“Never use a hair dryer”, I just read in two different articles, which looked up because I really wanted to know more about that rice advice (no one is talking about that, by the way). Ouch, that hair dryer wasn't such a good idea, because the heat can damage the sensitive parts and the wind can blow the moisture in the direction of extra moisture-sensitive parts. Fortunately, the hair dryer was on low; I'm pretty sure the laptop itself produces more heat than it endured from my action. And the laptop wasn’t like soaking wet, so I don’t think that a lot of moisture could have been moved. But I didn't unscrew enough components to see everything.

In the event of a disaster, you have to act quickly, but if you have to think about what exactly to do at that very moment, you may end up doing things you shouldn't have done. A wet laptop must be switched off completely as soon as possible, all plugs must be removed and then you dry it as well as possible inside and out. So far I've done the right things. At that point I should have done what I only did this morning: get information about the next steps. And of course it would have been even better if all this had been ready knowledge.

I pointed out to my daughter that she should have come to me as soon as she noticed that the laptop was damp – because she certainly had. She looked taken aback when I told her that her laptop would be left open to dry for at least a day. “But then I can't do anything for school!” she exclaimed indignantly. Yes that's right. And this event also reminds us that she should not store her files on the laptop, but on the NAS (hard drive in our home network). I told her this long ago, but after that I never checked whether she actually acts upon my directive, and whether she understands how to do it at all.

Moral of the story: as soon as you know or suspect that something is wrong, you must report it to a competent authority. My daughter should have brought the damp laptop to me right away. And if you come across something in your work that could harm security, report this to the service desk and/or the security officer. And of course informing your manager is always a good thing – they are supposed to be able to tell you what to do (see previous sentence). Don't try anything yourself, except of course pull the plug from a smoking device and things like that.

The laptop is now sunbathing on the windowsill. Hopefully it will recover.

There will be no new Security (b)logs for the next two weeks.

 

And in the big bad world…

This section contains a selection of news articles I came across in the past week. Because the original version of this blog post is aimed at readers in the Netherlands, it contains some links to articles in Dutch. Where no language is indicated, the article is in English.

 

• you preferably don’t save your passwords in the browser; use a password manager instead. [DUTCH]
• working from home leads to more data breaches and security incidents. [DUTCH]
• Bluetooth was never intended to unlock cars; now it can be used to steal cars.
• you should watch out for (among other things) digital scams when booking your holiday. [DUTCH]
• the Apeldoorn City Pass leaked login data of citizens. [DUTCH]
• a man faces court for trading in the personal data of a quarter of a billion people. [DUTCH]
• privacy and law enforcement sometimes clash. [DUTCH]
• you can try to hack a song festival, of course. [DUTCH]
• more Linux malware has been observed. [DUTCH]
• a Swiss bank account is no longer a safe haven for cyber criminals. [DUTCH]
• the NCSCs of various countries jointly give tips to organizations about frequently made security errors.
• the Tax and Customs Administration should take a closer look at the GDPR. [DUTCH]