Lenovo Service Disables Laptops With a Text Message

narramissic writes "Lenovo plans to announce on Tuesday a service that allows users to remotely disable a PC by sending a text message. A user can send the command from a specified cell phone number — each ThinkPad can be paired with up to 10 cell phones — to kill a PC. The software will be available free from Lenovo's Web site. It will also be available on certain ThinkPad notebooks equipped with mobile broadband starting in the first half of 2009. 'You steal my PC and ... if I can deliver a signal to that PC that turns it off, hey, I'm good now,' said Stacy Cannady, product manager of security at Lenovo. 'The limitation here is that you have to have a WAN card in the PC and you must be paying a data plan for it,' Cannady added."

Comments

Re:Always assuming ...

[RMingin]

Yes, it'll probably be as secure as the Lenovo BIOS supervisor passwords.

(Hint: Supervisor password? Get a paperclip. The data pin goes to ground, boot laptop. Enter bios. Remove paperclip, set [new] supervisor password. It overwrites the old one. Which chip to mess with and which pins are which I leave to you and Google. Shouldn't take long.)