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Man Uses Remote Logon To Help Find Laptop Thief
After his computer was stolen, Jose Caceres used a remote access program to log on every day and watch it being used. The laptop was stolen on Sept. 4, when he left it on top of his car while carrying other things into his home. "It was kind of frustrating because he was mostly using it to watch porn," Caceres said. "I couldn't get any information about him." Last week the thief messed up and registered on a web site with his name and address. Jose alerted the police, who arrested a suspect a few hours later. The moral of the story: never go to a porn site where you have to register.
Never leave your laptop on top of your car when carrying other things home!
What, did you think this thing was portable?
He was probably running a dynamic DNS client.
Prob running something like dyndns or something that would automatically notify the server of the ip address when online, so he simply had to use his registered dyndns name.
Not to advertise, but try www.logmein.com, its free, and the you can log in to the computer as if you where sitting in front of it.
How could be this done? How could he connect to his laptop without knowing the IP address?
One word, DynDNS.
"Nobody knows the age of the human race, but everybody agrees that it is old enough to know better." - Unknown
Several remote access apps have an option to notify via email when your IP address changes.
I'm not entirely sure, in general. Some laptops (including mine) have part of CompuTrace built into the BIOS, so it can persist across hard drive reformats and replacements. I have no idea how it actually manages to integrate with the newly installed OS and access the internet to continue tracking the computer after a hard drive replacement, though. http://www.absolute.com/products-bios-enabled-computers.asp I discovered this by accident a few months ago when I was looking at a hex dump of my BIOS for fun and was quite surprised to see a "CompuTrace" message in there.
This really doesn't help you in the case that the thief has stolen your machine and has it physically in his own workshop with his own set of screwdrivers.
If you're paranoid about your security (and in some jobs you should be), then for portable machines you want to encrypt the whole disk - and, ideally, have something that scrubs the disk after N successive failed login attempts, where N is some small number. Yes, of course it's backed up. You're competent aren't you?
I'm old enough to remember when discussions on Slashdot were well informed.
It uses the hard drive's Host Protected Area to store the software, so you need special software to remove it.
Probably not actually. From TFA:
Q. What happens if a computer's hard drive is removed?
A. The Computrace Agent resides on a computer's hard drive so if the drive is removed and installed on another computer, the Agent will initiate contact with the Monitoring Center at its next scheduled call. It will then report its new location. The original computer will no longer be protected.
If your scenario was correct then it would reinstall the trace software on the new hard disc.
-- Soruk
I always found this hard to believe, someone wanna explain how that would work without custom hardware.Do they assume the bootloader will be left behind?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Host_Protected_Area
Looks like this is the answer.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Host_Protected_Area
We have CompuTrace on many of our laptops here at work. Only certain manufacturers have the agent pre-loaded but it is embedded in the BIOS. If you flash the BIOS and put different firmware on it you can wipe it out. CompuTrace won't work if you formatted the machine and put Linux on it since they don't (currently) have a Linux version of their agent.
CompuTrace is really not a great service though because some of their promise is that they'll recover your laptop in X days or pay you $1000, guaranteed! What they don't tell you is that to keep this "warranty" active you have to make sure that your laptops check in at least once every few weeks or else they call you and demand that you check-in the laptop within a week or lose your warranty.
This is a real pain when you have laptops that are being taken home by your users and they don't have internet at home or just leave it sitting in a desk drawer for weeks at a time. Trying to track down all of the machines to make sure they are hooked up to the internet to check-in at least once every few weeks is a total mess.
"To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield." - Tennyson