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What Are the Best Laptop Theft Recovery Measures?
BarlowBrad writes "Yesterday my house was broken into and among other things two laptops were stolen. Getting past the feeling of violation, I am looking to the future and how to both prevent theft and recover computers should it happen again. I have found various services that claim to track and recover stolen laptops such as LoJack for Laptops, Computrace, GadgetTrak and Undercover, but I (obviously) have no experience with any of them. I also know that Intel will be coming out with a new anti-theft technology chip, but that isn't supposed to come out until the fourth quarter and I'll be replacing the laptops before then. Does Slashdot have a recommendation between these services or suggestions for another?" Read on for a related question about automating this process.
BarlowBrad continues: "I have also wondered if there is a 'home brew' solution that I could cook up myself. I'm not an elite programmer, but I am somewhat computer savvy and open to ideas. At least one of the replacement laptops will have to be a Windows machine, but the other may be a Mac or run Linux, so ideally I'd want a solution for multiple platforms. Perhaps a script that sends an email with the IP address every time the computer connects to the internet? Or is there already something out there like that in the Open Source community?"
For Your Eyes Only I think.
Mod down parentpost, & don't click the link.
do not click.
DRM: Terminator crops for your mind!
Just look into one of the scripts to update a dynamic IP address with a dynamic DNS service, and set it up to be automatic. As soon as the computer connects, it will update the address.
Perhaps a script that sends an email with the IP address every time the computer connects to the internet?
.mil and .gov addresses that reads like this:
Dude, the scumbag just stole your laptop. Get creative. Instead of just having the a bot or something send you an email so you can identify them, go this route. Have it send an email to a bunch of
ALLAH ALLAH!!! I want to NUCLEAR BOMB the white house!!! I have a sleeper cell that already has a plan in place to kidnap beautiful AMERICAN CHILDREN and teach them ISLAM!!! DEATH TO GEORGE BUSH!!!
You could add in whatever else you feel like. That stuff was just off the top of my head.
I got a catholic block.
I have a big self-printed Linux Sticker on top, with clear foil on top of it and 2cm over the edges. While it is possible to remove it without trace, any thief will not know that and there is a reasonable chance they will stay away. At least if they are competent thieves. People that break into flats typically are not.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
Want to click, want to click! The link glitters in my monitor. Maybe there are diamonds or a goatse! Want to click, want to click!
I had a brand new Apple laptop (still in bubble wrap) in my suitcase. It was stolen by the baggage handlers at north west airlines (LA airport). Stupid me - I'm from Australia where you just DON"T expect this. I tried to complain to North West - they don't have ANY facility to complain about theft - they have NO contact numbers, and their web complaints form was broken. I never fly North West anymore.
Now, if that laptop had a tracking CHIP. I would get me a KNIFE, a Crocodile Dundee KNIFE and mosey my way down to LA. I'd recover my laptop. The thief would then need to have a hook fitted on his bloody arm stump.
consider coffee a lubricant that helps one penetrate the coding zone
Although laptops can be expensive, I think the real danger is the potential disclosure of personal and business data on the lost computer. There are several programs that will erase the drive remotely if the laptop is reported stolen by the owner. Here is a link to one as an example, but I haven't used it, so I can't vouch for it: http://www.sharewareplaza.com/Zapeze-download_39642.html http://backpackcomputing.com/
May I suggest:
http://www.smith-wesson.com/
http://www.colt.com/
http://www.remington.com/
http://www.glock.com/
http://www.sigsauer.com/ (personal favorite!)
http://www.hk-usa.com/
http://www.uzi.com/
"I say we take off, nuke the site from orbit. It's the only way to be sure."
a) run an openSSH or VNC server, and
b) write a cronjob/Scheduled Task to shoot a ping at some IP address you control periodically whenever IP connectivity is present.
This will only work if your computer appears to be usable by a thief without wiping the OS. If the thief is dumb, he'll at least try and get on the Internet with it, and then you can swoop in and pwn him.
DRM: Terminator crops for your mind!
Glue your laptop to your desk. I won't guarantee that it will not get stolen, but it is a lot harder to steal an entire desk than a single laptop.
Forget recovery. If you had color glossy photos with circles and arrows the cops will STILL not bust into someone's home to recover your laptop.
You can't get them to stop crime in progress, let alone last week's crime.
Denial of use of stolen laptops is the best bet. Not only denial of access to the data, but denial of use of the hardware, or making it very expensive and suspect when trying to get a stolen box running.
This means encrypting drives, biometric readers, or any number of additional features, most of which are expensive, some of which do impose a hurdle for the thief.
Encrypted drives are becoming mainstream and easily affordable, and generally do work to keep your data safe.
But none of this will prevent you from losing the box to a thief. They will steal it anyway, even if they dump it in the trash because they can't make it work.
Sending an email with an IP does nothing. Installing dyndns.org IP updater software would work just a well. It leaves a record in a remote place, but savvy thief would know how to erase that, just as they would know how to prevent your email from going out.
Even if you find the IP of the stolen box, the ISP will need a court order to reveal the location to you. Good luck with that. Cops won't take action. They will tell you to file an insurance claim and move on.
Side note: Thieves are seldom savvy. If they had any brains they would get a less risky job. So chances of them disabling any counter measures are fairly slim.
Sig Battery depleted. Reverting to safe mode.
Parent, not grandparent.
DRM: Terminator crops for your mind!
*pssst* America hasn't given up our guns yet.
[End Of Line]
The old standby goes -- there's no one security measure that's perfect, but you can make it a lot easier.
The first and most obvious layer is physical access. Don't leave your laptop visible in your car when you park. Lock your office doors. Don't leave it at a coffee house when you go to the bathroom.
The second is physical security. Invest in a laptop leash and chain it down if you work in a shared office space environment.
The third layer is physical deterrence. Customize the heck out of your computer. A big engraved security mark (be it your driver's license #, your name, your cell #, your email address, whatever) will turn off thieves. Same if you've got anything else that's obviously unique and can't easily be removed.
The fourth layer is electronic deterrence. A boot password and a screensaver password will deter unskilled theives. There are plenty of skilled thieves who plan to reformat the drives, but a few will be deterred by not being able to sell the laptop on the corner without a password. (If you don't believe me, hang out in midtown NYC long enough and you can get offers to sell hot laptops in the $100 range).
The fifth layer is tracking. Things like LoJack and all the other services. If they boot your laptop it'll contact the network and you can at least have a shot at getting it back. (Note, some of these are not compatible with a boot password). Of course, record your Windows serial # (if you run Windows) and your Dell quick service code (if you use a Dell) or the equivalent for your system. These are uploaded.
The sixth layer is luck. Sometimes people catch theives by webcam, sometimes by stupid emails, sometimes by pure random encouters. You gotta get lucky.
No one of these layers is sufficient and it's silly to talk about LoJack for Laptops if you leave your laptop sitting in the open for somebody to grab it. LoJack is most useful to break open crime rings, not to actually get your laptop back -- by the time the police get around to subpoenaing the ISPs your laptop is gone, but the thieves might not be. I run it, but I don't expect it to save my butt.
bios hacks have always interested me but the lack of open source bios firmware has prevented me getting into it. I reckon a bios hack that does a "check in" when connected to the internet could work wonders. once you mark the system as stolen you could send a command to brick the laptop, sound an alarm or maybe randomly goatse the new owner. you'd quickly be able to trace back where the sale came from... 90% of the time i'm betting on ebay.
If you mod me down, I will become more powerful than you can imagine....
From what I understand, the police usually aren't very interested in following up your homebrew solution with a subpoena compared to a commercial offering.
Encrypted hard drive
Regular backups
Insurance
If it makes your insurance company happy, pay for a commercial lojack (which will be useless if you encrypt your HD). Then let your laptop get stolen when it's time for an upgrade.
At my school, all students are provided with a laptop. All computers come loaded with Computrace, and it has never failed to recover a stolen laptop...even ones that have ended up overseas after being wiped and sold on eBay. The only time Computrace fails is if a) the CMOS is physically replaced or b) the laptop never sees an internet connection again.
That's a spoon.
DRM: Terminator crops for your mind!
It's hardware get over it, that is what insurance if for. If I were to take a computer I would do one of two things. If I was after the data I would try to get access to the system but it would never be hooked up to a outside network and if it were not to one traced back to me. If I was after the system, then I would wipe the computer. So until there is some kind of hardware to do this that can not be disabled through the BIOS:
1) Forget the computer, If the data that was on it is that irreplaceable it should have been backed up (in some secondary location portable HD are cheep these days). poo hoo if you didn't your learned your lesson and you will now.
2) If the data was in any was sensitive you should have encrypted the hard drive and used some sort of hard drive lock mechanisms like what is available on the ThinkPad's.
3) If the machine was valuable it should have been insured, not left unattended and/or unsecured with some kind of lock method and/or in view of the public. If it was a crime of opportunity a cable lock or just putting the computer into a locked cabinet would probably be enough to save you all this trouble.
Stop looking for someone else to fix your problems and have big brother take responsibility for you.
Do some basic defense, learn from your mistakes and move on,
Good Luck!
My condolences- being robbed just sucks.
I hope that you do as well as the person whose cell phone was left in a cab and taken by that girl who took pictures of herself. There's nothing more satisfying than putting a face on the criminal, and showing them off to the world.
(Won't someoneses gives us a link, precious? We knows you remembers that story...)
What about adding a thermite compartment tied to an RFID or failed ownership confirmation?
Buddy of mine had a laptop stolen last week, they traced it when it booted up and started that SETI stuff. Absolutely funny.
1. Backup to media, and keep that media offsite and rotate it out frequently; check to make sure that the media is readable and usable.
2. Record your serial numbers, model numbers, CD keys (if needed), versions, and other characteristics of your hardware and then scan it to PDF and upload it to an online account as a draft message entitled: if_it's_stolen.
3. Use your camera to take pictures of everything you own for your insurance company. Link these items where possible into the aforementioned file.
4. File a police report, in detail, quickly, and then the same to your insurance company if you have one.
5. Hide your most important stuff; most burglars have to get in and get out quickly and aren't going to look between couch cushions, under garments in a closet, and so on. If your machine is your life, then make sure your life is hidden, obscure, or with you at all times. I prefer with me at (almost) all times. When in doubt, obscure it.
Sorry for your loss; look on craigslist and used computer shop sites.
---- Teach Peace. It's Cheaper Than War.
I have a Macbook Pro and decided to get Undercover for it. It's easy to set up and doesn't require a subscription, unlike some of the other programs out there. I'd read a bit about it before getting it, and the thing that really helped me in the end were the success stories that they have posted on their website. The fact that it makes use of the MacBook's built-in video camera to snap pictures of whoever is using it really impressed me.
Get a free dyndns account and stick an update client on there (the official one looks pretty slick these days).
While you're there you could install VNC server too so you can take control of it (if it's connected directly to the internet), or some over remote control solution (gotomypc etc.)
I have a cron running on my windows and linux machines. The cron job calls a script that uses CURL to request a page and throw away the result. The page request contains a GET parameter with the machine's name. The website contains a PHP script which compares the sending IP from one currently in the database for that machine (in this case a plain text file is used as the database). If that IP doesn't match what is in the database I get an email notifying me that a particular machine has a new IP address. In addition, I update my DNS records as a poor man's dyndns service for my own domain.
I know within a few minutes whenever any machine I control changes IP. This is also useful for remote access and tech support.
I also keep a time stamp, so I can see if a machine hasn't checked in within a certain period of time. I don't do anything with this yet.
Dekker Dreyer
What!? ... you probably have a security policy, and a backup policy, but no Plan d'evasion (http://www.donrearic.com/plandevasion.html)? It worked for Steve McQueen in Papillion. See this link(http://apple.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=08/04/18/1515236) ... and if any thief attempts to search you, just fart in their general direction
about IBM "Internal Use Only" Macs that work great in concealed body cavities
Have it owned by the mafia?
Focus on securing the data with encryption and remote-wipe capabilities.
Then insure the assets... odds are you're never getting them back.
lol, be my guest, but don't say I didn't warn you :P
put it in a briefcase and handcuff it to your wrist...
Politics is Treachery, Religion is Brainwashing
I hadn't heard of Computrace / Absolute until about two weeks ago, when we found two computers at my office talking to "search.namequery.com" several times a second. What I find is interesting: A program that installs without my permission or knowledge, takes orders from a 3rd party (up to and including "wipe the hard drive"), and actively resists removal.
One computer was brand-new (MPC/Gateway M685), the other just over a year old (MPC/Gateway E475). The first one they claim was "accidentally" activated at the factory, the second got a motherboard replacement that had this little program "activated" from its prior owner.
The sales rep at MPC/Gateway got the Absolute/Computrace rep on the phone and they both claim that it isn't a virus. Okay, fine, it doesn't self-replicate. Seems to fit darn near every other part of the definition! Their tech-support guy ordered the two computers to disable their BIOS component and uninstall, which THEY DID! The files in C:\Windows\System32 vanished before my eyes.
They were back the next day.
Gateway/MPC doesn't seem to understand my frustration. We spend so much time and money securing our computers and making sure they run only the software we WANT them to run. Now you want me to feel safe with a BIOS-level program that copies itself to FAT32/NTFS partitions and tricks Windows OSes into executing it? This same program that calls a 3rd party and requests instructions? I know of only three instructions it can accept, but what if there are others? ("Stolen, check in every 15 minutes", "Stolen, wipe hard drive", "Disable and uninstall" we know of)
I asked how they secure the disk-wiping function and was not impressed with the answer. They use an RSA token to verify that the right customer called in. I said 'Ok, what about the link to the computer? Is it signed or encrypted?' No answer, they just went back to the RSA token.
Heck, we have BlackBerries that can wipe themselves on remote command but RIM makes a big deal of how the communications are encrypted between the BB and my server. I know that J. Random Cracker isn't going to trick my BB into nuking itself. But what if he spoofs "search.namequery.com" and returns the code for "Nuke HD"? Will their little 200kb program accept the order?
I read that someone found and disabled Computrace/Absolute's BIOS code in a firmware dump and then re-flashed his machine. If I can't pull that off with Gateway/MPC I will have to recommend that we find a vendor that does NOT pre-infect the computers we purchase.
*grumble*
Just check eBay. Both of them will be there before you know it. It's how I got my stolen laptop back.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Unless you're talking about a casual theft by somebody who intends to sell the laptop on the street, or for their own use, this won't work. If the laptop is fenced, the first thing the fence will do is wipe the hard drive. They do this to remove any trace of the original owner, though it also prevents any phone-home scenario.
Recent products like Computrace/LoJack (same product, different brands) can be installed in the BIOS so a disk wipe doesn't affect them. The catch is that it has to be installed at the factory, so you have to buy the security software (and an annual subscription) when you buy a new laptop. Also, it isn't that hard to reflash a BIOS....
I shouldn't need to point out that you should also have a bare-metal recovery backup. In fact, that's probably more important than any anti-theft measure: paying $1K for a new laptop hurts, but not as much as losing all the work that's on your laptop. A bare-metal solution spares you the hassle of re-installing all your applications and re-applying all the customizations we geeks love to do.
Beware what they DONT tell you up front about the data wipe option...
You have two choices when a laptop is stolen. Trace it or wipe the data off it to keep it out of the wrong hands. thats for stuff like SSNs, etc. You dont get the HW back, but they dont get your important info. In some cases an acceptible trade-off.
Our company started using them for a few key laptops located in our service vehicles that run in bad neighborhoods. We bought it primarily for the tracking mechanism, but considered them for sensitive systems like for HR, etc. where we would wipe to prevent any release of proprietary/confidential info.
After signing up the first laptop, I investigated the wipe option. To use it you have to sign a LONG contract, designate no more than 3 employees that can initiate a wipe, and the kicker... buy an RSA key fob from them at a cost of $700 each, and they are only good for 2 years at which point you have to re-purchase. So for my company we were looking at $1000 per year in addition to the normal subscription costs that we pay per unit.
Still a reasonable price to pay to prevent a catastrophic data breach, but that extra cost and hassle would have been nice to know up front.
A laptop has a crummy little keyboard that will give you RSI, a screen that is small enough to give you eyestrain and a fiddly little trackpad if you are lucky. If you are less fortunate, it will just have one of those nasty little pointers that is about good enough for a sales weasel to do powerpoint with.
A desktop system will be cheaper, more powerful with mouse and keyboard of your choice and as many big screens as you can afford.
I have an old laptop. The only thing it can do that my desktops (home or work) can't, is let me watch TV, eat and surf at the same time. I will get a Hauppage card for my home PC at some point then the only extra thing my latop will be able to do is keep my privates warm!I'll see your Constitution and raise you a Queen.
It could be a good idea to hide a little DYNDNS update routine on each of one's computers (and thankfully DYNDNS will even give you multiple IDs that you can update, so you can have a different one for each computer). But I'll want to see a lot more positive feedback by people who did this or similar things before I will think it's very likely to be helpful. Now if you had a GPS in that laptop and sent out it's coordinates when updating, you might be able to do yourself a lot more good (unfortunately, GPS doesn't work well indoors).
I'm an American. I love this country and the freedoms that we used to have.
The real Lojack system, for cars, predates the Internet and GPS. It's pretty good. About 90% of Lojack-equipped cars are recovered when stolen. When you buy Lojack, an installer comes out and installs a little box somewhere on your car. You don't know where, and they have many alternative locations. It gets power from the car, so it keeps itself charged.
The unit finds an FM broadcast station with the Lojack subcarrier and listens for a message with its serial number. If your car is stolen in an area with Lojack coverage (which includes most major US cities), a police stolen car report is copied to Lojack's computers, which then tell the subcarrier transmitter at the broadcast stations to start broadcasting messages with the unit's serial number. The unit in the car then starts emitting a beacon signal.
Lojack has good integration with big-city police departments. They equip police cars with Lojack receivers at Lojack's expense. Any Lojack receiver that's emitting turns on indicators in police cars, showing direction and approximate range. When you see a police car with four antennas in a square on the roof, that car has a Lojack receiver.
In Los Angeles, the LAPD's air force, both rotary and fixed-wing, has Lojack receivers. This has resulted in some dramatic stolen car recoveries. Cops like the system, because not only do they get cars back, they often find someone they want driving the stolen car.
But "Lojack for Laptops" doesn't use that system. It just reports IP addresses when the unit connects to the Internet. A company called Absolute Software seems to have just licensed the Lojack name; it's apparently not part of Lojack Corporation at all.
http://ask.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/09/18/1819239
For Macs I just created a bash script which is scheduled to periodically(and during startup) check in with a PHP script on our webserver by sending it's serial number.
When the PHP script replies and says that the laptop is stolen(in non-obvious language), the bash script send the machines IP address. The PHP script then emails the laptop's IP, apparent IP, and serial number to me.
Now if the laptop has the iSight camera, it grabs a single shot from the camera(See: http://www.intergalactic.de/pages/iSight.html
) and sends it to the PHP script along with everything else.
It's all shoe strings and duct-tape but it may help in recovery.
Guru Meditation #6d416769.21610a21
Buy a really crappy laptop that nobody would steal, and when it gets stolen anyways, shrug and go buy another one off ebay.
If you want a fancy laptop, insure it against theft, encrypt the HD and have everything backed up daily.
Those are the only useful measures you can take.
From the makers of Trunk Monkey, why not get a Laptop Monkey for theft recovery? Upon activation of the stolen laptop the monkey will leap out from nowhere with ninja-monkey-like reflexes, subdue the nefarious thief and hitchhike all the way back to your home with your property!
please mod parent down for trolling
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If you have any further information on this threat please contact us at 1-800-HELP-FBI
CowboyNealGuard
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
The problem is, even if you figure out exactly where your laptop is, you then have to convince the police to help you get it back. That's where things really break down.
A friend of mine was scammed on Yahoo auctions a few years back by someone who pretended to sell golf clubs, took a cashier's check via mail, then never sent the clubs. Yahoo was useless, of course, so he got the email addresses of a bunch of other bidders, and found EIGHT people who had been scammed by this person (he was claiming "the winner backed out, so I'll offer it to you"). He tracked down the address of the scammer in L.A., then tried giving all of this information to the LAPD, LA FBI office, and US Post Office. All of them basically blew him off... the FBI said this was intrastate (from San Francisco to Los Angeles) so they weren't interested. The LAPD just said it was unlikely to ever be a priority enough to investigate, and the USPS said the dollar value was so low based on their investigative resources that they just can't bother (mental note: when you get swindled, make sure it's for as much money as possible!) Even better, when my friend got frustrated at the LAPD and said "well, I know his address, should I just go there myself and deal with it?" they told him that he would be responsible for any altercation that ensued...
Anyway, you can have all the tracking systems you want on a laptop, the problem it may be impossible to find authorities worth helping you get it back. Who knows, maybe these laptop recovery services know how to grease the wheels, in which case that in itself is a reason to consider them... but it seems like appropriate security/encryption, homeowners insurance, and regular backups are the best way to deal with personal computer theft...
What i've seen as mainstream for uni's, is scarring each laptop with a brand and numeric id.
They do it like this: A perforated sticker is applied, some pasta is rubbed on and set to etch it for 5 minutes. Then another pasta is applied to stop the etching process, filling all the gaps with something ink-like. And voila: a nice normal sticker that actually also embedded itself on the chassis of the laptop. A thief will see its well-thought-tru and will assume its not the only protection the laptop has.
On the software area: Location logging software, which simply fetches some stuff like a traceroute, uptime, timezone, username, etcetera should be employed (custom made). A online system logs whatever it didn't encounter before on that sytem.
The agent script works like this: it makes a tcp connection and sends the data. If several ports and udp fail, email fail, catching a ride on another application fails, it will go silent. If silent for a certain amount of uptime, it will selfemploy wifi, umts etcetera if available. When it will connect, it'll catch up with what was going on.
Rumor has it that GPS is tracking installed but i don't think so considering this ussually is bulky
I fully encrypt my laptop drive, since it carries lots of secret corporate data and IP, and fully back it up at the office, so I am not too worried about theft of the hardware.
...) are already fingerprinting foreigners. It looks like the days of international business travel will soon be over.
I am however scared that at an US airport, or at the airport of some other repressive regime, I may be forced to hand over my laptop, and then detained for not providing the decryption password. Keep in mind that if I am forced to reveal the contents of my laptop, that I can be sued by shareholders (for leaking IP) and business partners (for breaking NDA), I can lose my business relationships and hence my income, and I potentially be charged for breaking EU (and other) directives on data protection.
The problem is that I work extensively with banks and I cannot allow banking data to be leaked, nor can I allow sensitive and very valuable corporate IP to be given to potential competitors of a country that I am visiting or passing through.
Unfortunately, I need to have all of the IP on the laptop, since I often work on the data-centers of various banks worldwide, behind all of the firewalls, and these data-centers do not typically allow any type of Internet access. In addition, I would not feel safe putting 100% of the corporate IP and banking data on a public Internet server in my office, just so I can remote download 200GB or so onto a blank laptop, using a slow and/or expensive hotel Internet connection, everytime I fly, just so I can work in a remote location.
It is bad enough that countries (US, UK, Japan,
Buy a crappy laptop that no one would want to steal.
it's the only to be sure.
I'm sure this isn't an isolated case - I bet theft is rife. I found out later that you NEVER put valuables in a suitcase in the USA. It must suck to live in the USA.
consider coffee a lubricant that helps one penetrate the coding zone
You have a bigger problem than just the laptop. You need to find a way to protect your house from being broken into. I'm wondering if there are not some open-source tools to put up web-cams as motion-detectors that call your cell phone, perhaps with images, so that you can send somebody to take a look.
Table-ized A.I.
Can't help you with getting your laptops back, but I can give you a suggestion on how to force lowlife scum to pick your neighbor's house next time:
Dogs.
Not necessarily big, but loud. Most fucksticks who want your stuff don't want to deal with dogs, as there are far easier pickings right down the road. We have three. Homes have been broken into on either side of me, multiple times. I don't believe it's luck. Two border collies and a lab are simply a wrench in the works of a simple-minded shithead.
Believe me, someone wants in your house badly enough, no number of dogs, alarms, etc. will stop them. But the chances of someone wanting your stuff that badly are probably nil, and if they are willing to kill your dogs to get your stuff, they'll probably kill you too.
Dogs are the ticket. Think about it.
I have a desktop, and I can eat, watch TV, and surf at the same time. I just have a TV tuner hooked up to my monitor and I use the PiP screen.
Don't save stuff locally. At any point your machine can be stolen, destroyed, your battery can explode, your hard disk can fail, your house could burn down, you get the idea. It's not a question of if, it's a question of when. Just keep everything online and use a cheap pc.
All the laptops we buy come with it installed, just a feature from the manufacturer. Well, one of my coworkers got his laptop stolen. Computrace remotely ordered the tracking software to go hot (it checks in like once ever 24 hours or something) and started tracking the person. It took awhile to get all the legal shit sorted out but once all the proper documentation was signed and so on they narrowed the tracking window to 15 minutes, the police got the necessary subpoenas, found the guy's house and a whole host of cops showed up. Unsurprisingly, that laptop wasn't the only stolen thing they found there.
We now have the laptop back. Total it took maybe 5-7 weeks between it getting stolen and us getting it back. It probably would have gone faster had we already had the Computrace service set up, and already signed all the papers (things like papers giving a person official authority as a contact point, declaring that we really bought the system and so on). Regardless, it worked, we got the laptop back, some other people are going to get their stolen property back, and some criminals are going to spend some time in jail.
I can't compare it to other services, but I can say that it works. It also has a neat feature if you buy a laptop that has it preinstalled which is that the BIOS can reinstall it. So they wipe the drive, then the BIOS will just install Computrace back on the laptop. As far as I can tell, there's not really a way to get rid of it, short of knowing it is there and disabling it such that it doesn't run, but the BIOS doesn't know that it is broken. It is fairly sneaky software too. A good admin could find it, but only if they knew to look for it. It doesn't show up in casual inspection, and a normal user would have no idea where to look.
So... what if your laptop get wiped and some random OS (windows) is installed on it.
If you had a customized auto-running USB device connected and this hopefully inexpert windows install will activate your software and hopefully help you recover the laptops.
Well first you have to make it not so obvious... so best to have an internal USB installation. As far as making an auto-runnable USB mass-storage device you can try a U3 hack (see this quarter's 2600) or there are much more expensive USB devices out there that let you install data to a read-only auto-runnable USB "CD-ROM".
I'm honestly quite surprised that there isn't a retail product like this available. It's more convenient than a BIOS recovery system and more reliable than a pure-software solution.
"Cellular GPS LoJack Id: 81231982
;-)
If found contact: 123-456-7890"
If you are savy enough, hack BIOS to display the same message at boot time (some BIOSes allow you to add your own images - thats one way, or add message to MBR)
Better yet, on boot print "GPS position is acquired and transmitted."
Probably won't get your laptop back, but may mess with their heads and make them wonder if they are being tracked by hardware.
-Em
RelevantElephants: A Somatic WebComic...
I put my laptop on my bookshelf, like a book. Thieves really don't like books, and a notebook computer resembles some books I have on my shelf.
What Are the Best Laptop Theft Recovery Measures?
.44 Magnum.
GPS and a
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
My suggestion is insurance for the hardware and encryption for the data. Odds are you wouln't get your PC back. But with ID theft and corporate espionage on the rise the concept of the "common" thief is also changing - atleast in my opinion. I would suggest anything on your machine you consider to be outside the scope of public knowledge be encrypted. Depending on what you do for a living and do with your laptop the information on the drives is worth far more than the hardware itself - and is less likely to be traceable.
Most all of the systems (like Lojack) are relatively easy to defeat and many forms of denial of service are as well. You have a BIOS password? M'kay I have another white box I drop your drive into - also there are a few key generators out that will give you manufacturer override passwords for the BIOS on "home" computers sold by major manufacturers and plenty of DIY guides to manually over ride a BIOS on business level equipment.
Granted all of this assumes an above average level of competency in the thief and paranoia should only be to proportion with importance.
I have GadgetTrak on my Mac and it records video of the thief. It also sends ME the information instead of relying on a backdoor into my system that a company can access like LoJack, CompuTrace and Orbicule...one of the main reasons I chose it. It works very well. I just wish it had a backup function or a way to wipe the data.
Keep your good computers at home. Get some old clunker to take on the road. Scuff it up and make it look bad. Keep your data on a USB key on your keychain so you know you won't lose that. Your fast machines at home are available to you wherever you can find some bandwidth. A savvy thief may pass over your laptop when he sees how old it is. Instead of one nice laptop, get two or even three used ones for the same price and you'll have one for backup and one to scavenge for parts.
Backups are key of course because the data lost could be priceless but has GPS tech progressed to the point where it would be possible to put a small GPS device in a laptop that could be activated when the laptop is stolen? A good laptop costs at least 3 grand. I bet cars worth less than that have lojack.
You might try posting here: www.tsa.gov/blog/ - at least from appearances it's monitored by TSA ppl with "get stuff done" authority. Worth a shot anyways.
Min
On the whole, I find that I prefer Slashdot posts to twitter ones because I don't get limited to 140 chars before
Avail for at least 1 platform (the Mac) , but it's available NOW, and free:
Utilises the keyboard/mouse/tiltsensors as triggers, and takes a picture of the offender via the inbuilt camera (uploads it to your FTP server), and sets off a screeching car-alarm sound to scare the intruder. is remote-control-activated too!.
Install a website/keylogging utility such as webwatcher, which is also usefull for monitoring your childs activity. Then if the laptop is stolen, you can just log in to their site, and see the websites the laptop accesses, log the keystrokes, and most likely get the e-mail and personal information of the thief.
Either attach a small electronically triggered explosive to the underside and write a C++ program to connect to a remote unix shell and run a geo-ip on the local IP, or you could just install a screensaver that pops up with the message "I KNOW YOU STOLE MY LAPTOP. GIVE IT BACK OR ELSE" everytime your computer is idle for 5 minutes or more.
Statistics / Editing
notlong URL: http://slashblog.notlong.com
Total Clicks: 1237
Most recent 10 days with activity:
Date Clicks Unique IPs
2008-04-19 235 203
2008-04-18 1002 849
I can't be bothered to format it nicely, I am a troll after all.
1. Don't put social security numbers on your laptop. Remember, the more social security numbers that are left on your laptop, the higher chance it will get stolen and make the front page news!
I've had zero SSNs on my laptops, and they have never been stolen out of my car nor home.
Just a little tip from your uncle 'der!
It would be nifty to have a program on the laptop send you a list of the local WiFi SSIDs it can see if it ever connects to someone else's wireless network. With enough SSIDs, you may be able to approximate the location based on a sufficiently-large SSID wardriving map. Maybe something like this already exists? SSIDs like "Linksys" and "Default" won't be of any use, but chances are there will be a unique SSID nearby eventually.
If there was a way you could send a signal to your computer after it's been stolen and connected to the internet: You could signal your computer to use it's built in web cam to take pictures of what's happening and transmit them back to the server or store it on some sort of internal flash memory which only engages when the computer has been alerted it is stolen.
It may have some of the same problems of other services in this discussion but at least you would have some physical evidence of the crook who is sitting in front of your laptop.
Take a page from malware writers - add a script that connects to an IRC channel and lets you issue remote commands.
Of particular interest would be returning the results of various network utilities (ie traceroute), as well as displaying messages (ie: THIS LAPTOP IS BEING TRACKED. TO AVOID PROSECUTION RETURN WITHIN 24 HOURS) or just shutting it down, etc.
Just an idea :)
I saw this sign on the street in downtown Washington. I don't know how well it worked out for him, but it's pretty much an act of desperation for him at this point.
After getting pickpocketed nearly a decade ago in Paris, I have been more... Bond-villian-esq in my theft deterrents.
Simply stated I keep my money, cards, and identification in a chest holster at all times, and keep petty cash in my boot. There are two decoy wallets I choose from on a day to day basis. The first is just a chain letter. Simple, but carries my disdain well. The second is a modified 'securitypac'... This baby burns at 400F, and releases a plume of red smoke laced with tear gas... One of these has been stolen, though I did not catch by whom. Though I did hear some bloodcurdling screams a few blocks down...
My laptop is a cheap gateway 2000 laptop running DSL from nearly a decade ago... And yes, its "Security prevention" is along the same vein... Why use thermite when a remote deployment of bear mace around the computer when the thief powers it up is more likely to cause some harm?
Sure you can track the ip address, but having your picture plasted across the net may make people worry a bit more about stealing laptops with inbuilt cameras if the idea takes off. It wouldn't surprise me if this hasn't already happened. People just love those stories of thieves being caught red handed.
Backup your data off-site regularly.
Encrypt your sensitive data.
Insure your property.
Make a reasonable attempt to prevent casual thieves.
That's all you can do. Spending time or money on other approaches is at best a waste of money, and at worst a false sense of security.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Get a halfway decent alarm system. Then you, your family and laptops would be safer.
If you have a Mac I know there is a program that senses movement
Custom electronics and digital signage for your business: www.evcircuits.com
For preventing theft of the next one, try one of these ideas. (Or several of them)
Appearance:
1. Large, multicolored stickers pasted onto laptop, making it ugly and easy to identify.
Hand painting on the cover is also useful for this, provided you don't make the laptop
look like a work of art. The goal is to have a potential buyer avoid it like the plague,
so it won't get stolen in the first place.
2. Scratches on the top cover, that do not effect the integrity of the unit, reduce
the resale value. Thus less incentive.
3. Your telephone number engraved into the case.
(A client of mine once got two stolen computers back because I had written their
organization name and telephone number on the backs, with a sharpie! When the police
busted the ring, they saw the name/number and called them to come and pick up
their computers.)
Ruses:
4. Paper note, hand written, scotch taped to top of closed laptop:
"Display Bad. Replace."
5. Same, with wording:
"Won't Boot, suspect motherboard."
6. Label pasted on top, "Milford Police, Official Use Only."
(Not hand written)
Sizes:
7. Heavy and clunky. (hard to carry.)
8. Very small, like the AsusEEE, so you'll carry it with you everywhere,
instead of leaving it home. Bonus: Low cost also discourages the theft.
Minus: The EEE is very popular right now...get a small computer nobody wants,
with an operating system nobody wants. Think label, "Designed for Vista
Home Basic."
Paid and free phoning home:
9. Any of the phone home stuff others have mentioned.
Extraordinary Defense:
10. Have a very large Italian guy stationed by the laptop, giving an evil
eye to anyone approaching it.
If everyone set bios and hard disk passwords and encrypted disk laptops would be useless plastic crap to most common thieves. Professional thieves it would slow them down but not stop them. How about not getting the laptop stolen to begin with? Kensington locks are optional for most makes and models.
Theft is a crime of convenience. If you make it difficult to steal your laptop your chances are lower that it will be stolen.
An encrypted disk and bios password makes it difficult for a thief to resell your unit. Many bios passwords can be broken and many can not. Not many people who buy stolen laptops want to buy one that they can't see boot. Hit the thieves right in the pocketbook. Keep them trying to hack bios passwords and reinstalling windows and they will have less time to steal more inventory and make less money.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Maybe I'm missing something, but that makes no sense at all to me.
Wireless seems to have nothing to do with it, any time that you connect through a wired or wireless router connection you get a local NAT IP address. But the DYNDNS updating that was discussed in the post that I responded to is still valid; it registers the public IP address of the connection, not some private address. Traceroute will not give any additional information; once one has the IP address of where the computer connected from one should be able (with law enforcement and ISP cooperation) to find the point of connection.
Of course, if the thief only connect from public wifi hot spots, then one needs to catch them in that act. Same if they connect through a neighbor's router that doesn't have encryption enabled, although that likely pins down the thief to a very small geographic area. If they connect through their own router, wired or wireless, then DYNDNS gets their public IP address. So any home address connection would be a good target for a warrant. If people insist on running home systems without encryption they should expect such little surprise visits.
Why you think a traceroute to the IP address matters at all is completely unclear.
I'm an American. I love this country and the freedoms that we used to have.
To deter thieves from jacking my laptop I engraved my name, social security number, mothers maiden name, phone number, home address and birth date on the laptop SCREEN. They can't do anything without a screen right? Plus, when I catch the punks who did it, I can prove that I am the owner of the laptop. Nobody has stolen my laptop yet.
Orbis terrarum est non altus satis
Set a Boot password set a password to enter setup. Set a drivelock or hard drive passowrd. If you can disable boot from all devices except the internal hard drive. If the thief can not boot from a cdrom or any other USB device they must find the cmos battery which is different than the regular laptop battery. You will probably never see your laptop again but your average smash and grab thief will not be able to use the laptop and the guy he tries to sell it too probably will not give hime more than $20 for it because it will be a pain in the you know what to locate the cmos battery and pull it to reset the passwords.
holy f*cking sh*t ... thank goodness I clicked that on my Mac and not on my Windows box.
I have the most recently patched Safari 3.1.x build and it spawned a couple of blank windows (adblocked?) but I was unable to close anything so I forced-quit it. It also populated a Mail.app message window but did not send. It tried to launch Skype but since I had recently updated it the launch did not succeed (the OS stopped me with a dialog of "Skype is an application downloaded from the Internet. Do you..." so I clicked no)
I think I noticed a java applet launching initially in the browser before the madness started. I thought the applet was supposed to ask to be sandboxed and trusted before running?
Can't imagine the sort of insanity that this would have wrought on a Windows system!
Those who laugh at you for you having a Mac.. are the people who constantly call you to fix their PC.
If you aren't running firefox with noscript and addblock then you deserve to get griefed. The solutions are there. Don't use IE or barebones firefox and then complain that every link on the internet isn't safe.
An insurance policy with a low deductible, specifically written for replacement cost of the laptop.
If you have that, you can treat theft as if the thief is doing you a favor.
-fb Everything not expressly forbidden is now mandatory.
Its an initiation thing for a retarded trolling group. "You, too, can be a part of GNAA if you join today! Why not? It's quick and easy - only 3 simple steps! * First, you have to obtain a copy of GAYNIGGERS FROM OUTER SPACE THE MOVIE and watch it. You can download the movie (~130mb) using BitTorrent. * Second, you need to succeed in posting a GNAA First Post on slashdot.org, a popular "news for trolls" website. * Third, you need to join the official GNAA irc channel #GNAA on irc.gnaa.us, and apply for membership. "
I had a break in several years ago too.
Among many other things, the PC was taken. It had two partitions, Windows and Linux. It was never recovered.
The good thing is that I had a fairly recent backup using cpio on a tape drive. I was able to restore it just fine once I went on eBay and bought another tape drive. Newer module, with more capacity (10GB vs. 2.5GB) but read only backwards compatible.
Nowadays, I use an external disk in a USB 2.0 enclosure. No affordable tape drives can keep up with the fast pace of disk capacity and techies obsession with hoarding digital junk.
The other thing I did is have a monitored alarm system installed. The cost is some $27 a month, taxes included.
None of the above is laptop specific, but it does the job pretty well.
2bits.com, Inc: Drupal, WordPress, and LAMP performance tuning.
Modify the bios in such a way that a phantom solid state drive is booted which boots an emulator that then boots whatever OS happens to be on the drive. Programs in the phantom drive can then feed you all the data you could ever want.
I'd go on a Vegan diet but the delivery time from Vega is too long. --brownkitty
Blogging about it being stolen, getting it on digg and having everyone harass the thief seems to be effective
brickspeed.net for your old Volvo performance addiction
2. pester the shit out of the cops after the break in is reported (since cops don't do anything and are generally a waste of time) file suit if they refuse to follow up (which has happened with friends of mine)
3. find the guy who did it and shoot him in the face.
1. Get a lock for your front door... and then use it.
:)
2. Don't leave your laptops out in the open so people see them.
3. Don't walk more than an arms length away from your laptop.
4. Don't forget to buy insurance (not a lojack real insurance.) for theft, that includes your laptop.
5. When renting an apartment/buying a house. Do some research on types of crimes in the area.
6. Don't leave your laptop on the seat of your car.
7. get a kensington lock and use it.
8. get your head out of your rear, repository and think about what is going on around you.
Don't think this works? I've never had a laptop stolen and I've owned a number of them. Even on that one occasion where my car got broken into (laptop in the trunk). Bastard got my change in the cupholder though... god knows I miss that 50 cents in pennies.
I'm sorry, I'm to tired to be witty at the moment so this message will have to do.
1) safeguard your data. /home partition on my laptop is encrypted, so my data is inaccessible to others.
The
2) make the laptop unattractive to thieves
Have your name and address engraved on several parts of the housing and lid. Or have some metal or plastic tags engraved and bond them securely to case and lid (or even to the screen). This will make the tags impossible to remove without replacing the case (or the lcd). This will make the laptop harder to resell.
Never ascribe to malice that which is adequately explained by incompetence.
Hi
Dynamic DNS will not tell you much really.
If the laptop had wireless and you could write something to get the MAC Address of all the Access Points in the area and strength, then send this info back to you. Then if your lucky you may be able to look up these access points on a site such as mine, then work out an approximate position of the laptop. If the theift had an Access Point in their house and it was listed, then you would be very lucky.
I actualy use BIOS passwords, yes i know its a pain starting up but if you also use the facility to put personal info into the bios such as a name and phone number, then you might be lucky and they ring you for the password.
Where i use to work some brand new laptops were stolen, they didn't know how, but they were factory set with works details and a bios password. The idiot who stole them rang me for the password because he know i was a tech and knew the password, he gave some story that he got it at an action house. Of course i knew about the stolen laptops and he was arrested, apparently he had keys to every door, and had been taking stuff for years.
Puggs
Access Point Live Mapping Access Points with Google
FWIW I recently had a laptop recovered because someone ELSE had Lojack. Traced it back to a guy with a stash.
I'm not sure if anybody mentioned it, but it's 100% fullproof and very, very simple. Pay any company to laser-etch a note on the body of the laptop in two places. One being the upper cover and reading "This laptop belongs to John Doe and is not for sale" and a note under the battery or even on the underside saying "If someone's offering to sell this laptop, then it's stolen. Contact me at admin@pentagon.gov" It will look odd, but a laptop with your name and a note saying it's not for sale is hard to sell on the market and is very easily identifiable. For an added bonus you could stuff the insides of the laptop with drugs. Just the right amount for dogs to sniff it out, along with a note inside. You probably wouldn't get your laptop back but the people who stole it would have one hell of a time. And the ideas with the explosives are so dumb yet so tempting. I say, I would actually pay to see a thief waving torn pieces of meat hanging from where his hands used to be.
I've always wondered about this simple measure for Linux: the notebook is connected to the power wall outlet (and/or rj45). In order to take it, one must unplug the cables: setting off an alarm when switching back to battery mode / link comes down. In a library/office/etc. seems quite an effective and cheap measure.
AV vendors could add value to their products by allowing registered users to look up IP used for updates.
This is a simple solution if you leave your laptop on a desk,
get a Kensington lock cable, (about $NZD30) and wrap the cable around something hard to move and then lock it to your laptop.
Thiefs when they come into your home are fast, if i recall correctly they only hang around for about 5 minutes, if they cant get it off your desk they aren't going to hang around to get it off.
additionally they are going to have a great deal of trouble selling a laptop with 'what is left of' a Kensington lock in the laptop or a corner of a laptop broken off.
Software may be a good recovery tool, sometimes, but not getting it stolen in the first place is better
Not sure if there is much one can do about a stolen computer, I would not want to come face to face with the criminal due to the fact they must be pretty desperate to steal it in the first place. My solution is to use an online backup service. I use Carbonite which gives unlimited backup for $50/year. Fortunately I haven't had to "use" the service yet but if my laptop does get stolen I have the next best thing to getting it back, I will have my data...
Save regular backups on secure (preferably off-site) media, and get a good renters/home owner's insurance policy. Once its gone, its gone.
"...[treat] every man after his desert, and who should 'scape whipping?"
You can always open the laptops and install one of those cheap GPS chips that will allow you to track the position of the laptop in case it gets stolen.
No ascii art.
A dead thief does not steal again. Oh, you'll whine and say it's "too much" for a thief, but anyone who's ever had their laptop stolen would agree that death for the thief most CERTAINLY crossed their mind more than once.
Reminds me of the scene in the first Indiana Jones movie.
The one where the sword wielding arab is felled by a single shot from Indy's sidearm.
The best theft prevention is enamel paint, the type that is
used to color plastic models (at Walmart for about $10). Paint your
name on the laptop (and carrying case) in large letters. If you are an
artist or know one, it can be a fancy design as well.
The paint is not removable, so the best a thief can do is sell parts.
List your new laptops on your homeowners/renters insurance. Next time your laptops are stolen, forget about recover and call your insurance company. After paying your small deductible, order two new laptops with the payment you get from them. It is, after all, why you pay money for homeowners/renters insurance :)
Neil
Computrace is recommended by our local police department. They have had very good luck with recovering laptops with it installed and so we made it a city standard.
You should also consider a hard drive encryption software package. While Computrace might aid you in recovering your device encryption will prevent keep the data safe until you get it back.
I always went for the low tech.
I have a nice little padded zipper case I got at the Apple Store, only slightly larger than my Macbook. My "laptop bag" just just your usual generic backpack.
When in public, I don't allow it out of my site. If I leave it in my dorm, I make sure to lock the door.
In the off chance it would still be stolen, anything important is encrypted.
"On 3-18-08, within ten minutes of the LoJack system activating, a deputy from the COPS Unit assigned to the Compton area picked up the LoJack signal from the victim's stolen 1993 Honda Accord."
People have LoJack on '93 Accords?
This was solved by Q long ago...
When you close the laptop cover, turn the catches to the right. Then when the thief opens it, the gas canister contents are released and death or at least unconciousness follows soon after
Be sure to also fill the laptop with gold coins and store a dagger in the PC card slot.
Not only will this safeguard the laptop, but beautiful women will be drawn to you.
Nullius in verba
This is why it makes sense to have backups and a decent insurance carrier.
a dedicated service provider who has existing contacts within law enforcement.
Dare to dream. Most laptops don't even qualify as grand theft. You might as well be reporting someone stole your watch. You probably don't think the police would throw too many resources at recovering your watch, so why the hell do you think they'll care about a similarly-valued computer?
The TSA is going to open your bags no matter what. They will cut any non-TSA lock, and simply having such a lock I'm sure guarantees a search. The TSA lock is to keep your bag from being opened by thieves hanging out at the airport, so it does actually serve some purpose.
I think he wanted to continue using the laptop himself as well. I don't think "it's an anti theft device" will go very far when picked up by police, customs or those lovely TSA people.
:-)
The latter may even decide to check for more hiding places. Do you really want to invite the rubber glove treatment?
As for solution, there are forensic identity marking kits available. They're like a special liquid (also comes in a microdot form), and it comes with warning stickers. The stuff is nigh impossible to remove, it proves who the owner is and if you sell the laptop you just update the registration. And as someone else said, stick crypto on it so the data isn't vulnerable. You can do that in archive or bootup form with the latest version of Truecrypt (5.1a).
The only risk left is someone stealing it specifically for the reward
Insert
We (as in the company I work for) had a laptop stolen. It happens, so we thought, and bought a new lappy, restored the data etc.
However, we use logmein.com to control our pcs remotely for support. The old machine turned up online. We were dumbstruck. To avoid giving the game away we didn''t log onto to it, but we did get the IP. The ip belonged to one of the largest ISPs in the UK. They were no use, so I got a friend who works for Computer Crimes Unit to take a look. We did this because after 3 hours of trying to explain what an IP address was- "They stole your IP addess?" - ROFL we gave up.
Turns out that it was sold to a student, by the looks of it by the thief. We saw the large mp3 collection, the TI calc software etc.
Really stupid thing is police just were not interested at all. So peeps if your laptop is stolen, odds on you won't get it back.
http://www.writeitfor.us - Writing IT for the IT generation.
They're thieves. If they're stealing laptops, why wouldn't they steal someone else's wireless connection - especially when they want to "demo" the hot laptop to a prospective buyer?
All you'll get is a local private address in the "C" space - 192.168.1.*, or 192.168.100.* by default. As for traceroute - instead of saking, why not try it?
I've used many traceroute programs, when they serve a use. In this case it does not. How can you not understand that a DYNDNS updater will not be recording a private IP address, but rather a public one? Why not follow your own advice and try one? I use such an updater all of the time (it is far better than the update code built into my router) and know exactly what the result of such an update is.
I'm an American. I love this country and the freedoms that we used to have.
As I originally pointed out - How is recordng the public ip of an unsecured WAP going to help anyone find a stolen laptop? The thief will show that the lappy boots, and get their $50. There are no "warranties".
As for the buyer, 'Caveat emptor." They would probably wipe it down and install a cracked copy of an OS. It's not like copyright laws will stop them.
The ONLY solution for most people is to not let the laptop get stolen in the first place.
This is what I use: http://www.stoptheft.com/site/products_security_plate.php
So far it has worked great. No stolen laptops. If/when if fails (and the laptop gets stolen) I won't have any way to tell you about that, though.
Parent is correct. According to a show-and-tell by a burglar who strightened out his life, most burglars don't hang around with incriminating goods but get them fenced as soon as they can (within an hour or two). The fence's first job is to wipe off any trace of ownership and dispose of any goods that he cannot clean.
Engineering is the art of compromise.
Another guy getting visit from suits as we speak ...
--- I am known for the ones who want to find me on the net. Is that a privacy risk or a privilege? One might wonder..
Sorry I am late to the party, but I had to get me two pennies in...
As someone who was in charge of the Computrace program installs and rollouts where I work I had to chime in.
Its complete and utter crap!
There are any number of ways (I am sworn not to tell) to defeat the software. This includes the method of using the software form BIOS that was the latest trick they were employing. The simple truth is it doesn't work. I would suspect that other similar products suffer from the same problem. And if your running anything, but windows forget it...game over.
Power Corrupts,Absolute Power Corrupts Absolutely, leaving one person(group)in charge is absolutely corrupt.
BarlowBrad, sorry to hear about the thefts. All of the above tips are good ones. Of course, there's no perfect solution, but a "layered" approach to theft prevention will make it that much harder for thieves. If we keep in mind they want to get in and out fast, and without getting noticed, the layered approach is your best defense. The company I represent offers a permanent marking plate with a unique ID, a toll-free recovery hotline number, and a patented "stolen property" tattoo, which will discourage the thief from stealing the item in the first place, and will make it a big pain in the butt for a thief to try to resell. Again, no one soulution is perfect. You'll need to stack 'em up for best prevention and recovery. And crossing your fingers wouldn't hurt. Good luck, Doug Belfiore STOP - Security Tracking of Office Property www.stoptheft.com
As noted before, there is no Guarantee for true security. This said I've always wanted to invest in a type Lo-Jack system, something small enough to keep within a laptop. So that anytime the laptop is on, it will send out a Signal every 5-15 minutes to keep the power consumption very low. Bbut the hardware would have to be independent of the Bios & OS and would be capable of being removed for maintenance. I do not beleive it would be perfect and it's range very limited, but would be something worth looking at.
Bottom line... if you don't want your laptop stolen, don't buy a laptop - period.
#1... it doesn't matter where you put it. Theives will look in places you didn't even know you had.
#2... this guy's laptop was in his locked f'ing house. That's about as far from "where strangers wander around" as it gets without hiring armed guards.
#3... *hah* You've obviously never been robbed. A file cabnet/desk drawer is nothing to them. Even locked doors won't slow them down much. When our office was hit (among many offices in the building and along the parkway), every locked door was pried open; every desk drawer and file cabnet was pried open -- except the accounting cabnet which is made of heavy 12gauge steel.
#5... Negative. The CEO and CTO's laptop were stolen from the trunk of their car in CA. Just because nobody sees you put stuff in the trunk doesn't mean nobody will be willing to pop the trunk looking for stuff. (Simply being a rental car is enough of a reason.)
#6... Your only words of wisdom. I'm surprised people don't realize the battery in their laptop is often worth more than the entire laptop.
The reason the police don't put a lot of work into hunting down these theives is that it's far more expensive to hunt them down than to replace what was taken. That goes double when your insurance replaces what was stolen.
"With falling storage costs for flash storage you might see an odd shift back to early computing technology, prior to hard disks, where all the data was on portable storage media, floppy disks."
You are correct, I think, about the trend toward storing stuff on flash drives - nothing like keeping my most important data with me at all times on a key chain. But, I'd like to make a slight historical note here: While floppies do predate hard drives, hard drives didn't kill floppies, because they largely existed to solve different problems. They coexisted quite nicely. In the days before the Internet and CD-R, floppies were the basic way of transporting data from one computer to another.
I'd say CD-Rs and networking technology are largely what killed floppies, because they were vastly superior at doing exactly what floppies did - move stuff from one place another, something hard drives are not well suited for (well, external usb/firewire hard drives, but those came long after the demise of the floppy).
How about a big sticker saying "This laptop is Windows Vista Capable"? After all, everyone knows those laptops are pretty lame.
Or a sticker saying "linux inside"?
.. using TrueCrypt. Make sure it's as tame as possible ; you don't want to be banged up for contravening local decency laws.
:-
When asked, provide the key, but act embarrassed. Explain that you keep it in an encrypted partition to hide it from your wife, and from your corporate IT department.
Keep the real data in the TrueCrypt hidden volume inside the pr0n.
Using pr0n gives you several advantages
* It's a highly plausible excuse for having an encrypted partition.
* It's a highly plausible excuse for having a large encrypted partition. If you have a lot of confidential data, this is important - it's not good enough to just have a few innocuous spreadsheets with your tax receipts in there ; someone may spot that you have rather more room than you really need. A pr0n partition needs to be large, and needs room to grow because you're gonna be download more pr0n, right?
* Male customs inspectors will be distracted.
* Female customs inspectors will write you off as a harmless creep.
AND
* You have something to do in the hotel.
College-Pages.com - Online Colleges, Degrees, and Programs
I wrote an article about this a few months ago. Not sure if this link will work, but if not, just do a search for the title on the site--i.e. go to www.dailyfreepress.com and search for "Letter: BU should stress laptop security"
http://media.www.dailyfreepress.com/media/storage/paper87/news/2007/11/08/Opinion/Letter.Bu.Should.Stress.Laptop.Security-3088278.shtml
It discusses measures that businesses have taken--and that universities should be taking--to improve laptop security. As I stress in the article, prevention is about anticipating how someone would steal it and cutting off those possibilities.
Laptop Recovery Through Software:
You set your machine up so that people can boot to it (whatever you're running) and it phones home to some server. You can get an IP out of this, and you could also build in a back door and try to remote in. You'll almost certainly have to deal with unknown routers and firewalls though. If you get in, you can wipe sensitive data, and possibly get some more detailed info about the thief.
Cool stuff to do that I haven't seen mentioned:
See if they try to flog it on eBay or Craigslist. Write down your model number, and do daily searches. What about a script to send out tons of searches for child porn and such? Make sure it's got a info page (CTRL+ALT+F, CTRL+ALT+B, CTRL+ALT+I) so you can cover your ass if you do end up getting your laptop back, or if you somehow forget to reset your deadman switch.
None of those work if the drive is swapped/wiped, however.
Laptop Recovery Through BIOS/Firmware:
Hard drive passwords, BIOS passwords, CompuTrace, etc are all nice. Hard drive passwords are your best, and cheapest, bet for keeping your laptop data secure. If you buy from a vendor such as Dell, the thief will get zero support from the hard drive vendor if they want a reset, and if they contact Dell, they'll have to ID themselves.
As far as getting your laptop back, CompuTrace certainly helps, especially when you deal with law enforcement, but the machine does still have to power up and get out to the net. Standard BIOS flashes do NOT disable CompuTrace. A manual (with physical tools) flash or a re-chip will do the job though. At this point, you're dealing with a sophisticated thief.
But it all boils down to one thing: Prevention.
Nothing will prevent people from parting out / quickly reselling your laptop, though. Any insane physical modifications (acids, explosives, cattle prods) are going to get you in far more trouble (and bandages) than they're worth. The trick is to make it not worth the thief's time. Don't buy the uber leet laptops. Don't leave your laptop unattended. Use a lock cable. Read a book at Starbucks instead of MySpace. Don't go to Starbucks, you yuppie. Don't carry your laptop in a damned messenger bag. Don't wear glasses with thick black frames. Don't buy an Apple laptop. Engrave your laptop prominently in two places. Typically, the top (BUT MY APPLE LOGO! - See "Don't buy an Apple laptop."), and the battery.
Yeah, right. Recovery. Moron.
Everyone who steals a laptop has it re-installed clean in the next hour. Anything else is begging for arrest.
You're net an elite programmer? Forget it, then. You'd have to be really, really elite to do what you want.
Or you could try to dig for a laptop on which you can flash the BIOS with a Linux kernel and a script that posts its IP and location, but it would have to include a full TCP stack and I don't think it does that (and I'm not gonna check up on that just to prove you wrong).
Point is, you need to put the code where it can't be erased by a thief. And thiefs are all poor morons. There is no cheap thief who can erase the BIOS on a stolen laptop. Thus, stick the code in the BIOS. You need to be highly elite to do that on "just any" laptop, but one or two outdated models might be supported by LinuxBIOS. Which you'd need to edit heavily anyway. So, no solution.
You're fucked. And cops won't do shit, because if they began really searching for the 50,000 laptops yearly stolen in the US of A alone, they'd do nothing else.
Making laws based on opinions that stem up from false informations leads to witch hunts.
Yeah, that's one possible way. Will kill performance worse than Vista, though.
My idea to just insert a Linux in the BIOS with a script that sends data then boots the main OS is so much better. Sill not use emulation and thus won't kill perf.
Making laws based on opinions that stem up from false informations leads to witch hunts.
A good idea to add to that you can put a small embedded system in there that could slurp off of any network link. I'm thinking something like this would be cool.
http://linuxdevices.com/news/NS8386088053.html
I'd go on a Vegan diet but the delivery time from Vega is too long. --brownkitty
And cables don't do crap. If you've never broken out the tabs that hold them... let's just say the slots aren't particularly secure. And the cables themselves can be cut even more easily, locks picked, etc. The point of cables is to stop someone from gra
College-Pages.com - Online Colleges, Degrees, and Programs
Haven't followed the link, but, yeah, sounds just like what I explained. OF COURSE you'd use the first netlink available.
Making laws based on opinions that stem up from false informations leads to witch hunts.