Slashdot Mirror
What Is the Best Way To Track Stolen Gadgets?
An anonymous reader writes "Now that gadgets can determine their location and phone home, many companies are creating tools for finding lost and stolen gadgets. It sounds like a simple process, but this NY Times article describes a number of wildly different approaches. Some report all of the information back to the owner while others deliberately keep the owner in the dark to avoid dangerous confrontations. Some start grabbing pictures from the web cameras and logging keystrokes. Others just record IP addresses. Some don't do anything but record serial numbers to make it easier for the police to do their job. Are sophisticated systems dangerous because the tracking mechanisms could be misused to violate the privacy of the owner? Are the stakes different when a company purchases the software and gives the IT manager the ability to track everyone in the company? What are the best practices that are emerging? What should I recommend if my boss reads this article and wants to track our laptops and Blackberries?"
Some gadget, sure
You'd like to track.
What of that fur
Ever growing back?
Burma Shave
Get thee glass eyes, and, like a scurvy politician, seem to see things thou dost not.--King Lear
Build it in... When for x time no 'special' password is given the termite gets an ignitionsource. It should be quite easy after that to spot the thief. Whoever smells like bacon most is the one you're after :)
If you love something, let it go.
If it doesn't come back, it never was yours.
No matter what you as an individual do, it's nice knowing that as a whole, it's becoming a lot more dangerous to steal expensive toys, it's providing a deterrent for everyone. Built-in cameras and GPS, internet connected, really, you'd have to be quite a gambler nowadays to steal things with these features. We keep reading articles about thieves getting their pictures emailed to the owners, gadgets can brick themselves with a remote command, as well as the clandestine remote back into the owner's server with their current IP etc. I'm all for it.
My laptop's practically got a mind of its own if it takes a walk. Doesn't make me feel like I can be any less cautious with it, but sure makes me a little more at peace when I hear someone else lost their gear and there's nothing they can do about it short of file an insurance claim.
I work for the Department of Redundancy Department.
Short of a hardware based tracker, all the software methods seam to give up any hope of securing a system.
*To get a picture on a webcam you need to let the thief login,
*To connect to an encrypted AP you need to let the thief login,
*To get the gadget turned on for sustained amounts of time you need to let the thief login...
There are some potential exceptions,
*you could have bios periodically turn on, boot to a custom kernel,scan for APs and report its position (could use something like wesside-ng to report its location even if only WEP APs are available),
*you could have fake passwords (idiot words?) log you into a fake login/partition, but 1) this raises huge security issues 2) AFAIK this has not been implemented by any OS yet.
IranAir Flight 655 never forget!
We'd only have to snuff a few out. It'd make the nightly news, there'd be righteous outrage, and it'd blow over. People would tiptoe past that random laptop sitting unattended at Starbucks forevermore.
The webcam thing is okay and so is the tracking by IP. I like the getting even approach. Use GoToMyPC and mess with them. I live in a college town so the thief might be a student. I can log in and delete their term papers, or better yet edit them by inserting misspellings, incorrect facts, and lifting quotes from wikipedia and pasting them into the term paper unattributed. The term paper will have the name, the class, and the instructor listed on the upper righthand corner and I can visit the student before class and retrieve my laptop.
You don't - you have remote disable/nuke options. Once something is stolen, the odds of you getting it back at pretty small, since regardless of whatever tech means you have of identifying the owner, you still need to have someone go get it from the thief. Better option is to disable the device remotely (Blackberries have a nice set of tools for this). Once its gone, its gone, but this way they don't have your data or a working device.
Mod point free since 2001
...to remember when the advice was to put your SSN on your items so they could be returned to you if lost or stolen? Ah the good old days. (I have some 2nd hand power tools from my dad with his SSN on them. I figure that will be useful for paperwork later in life)
----- Connection reset by beer
Keep all the data on your portable devices backed up.
Keep all sensitive data on your portable devices encrypted.
Buy insurance.
---- Den ene knappen er powerknapp, den andre er Bender voice knapp "Bite My Shiny Metal Ass"
Ninjas
nuf sed
More music, fewer hits
There's a simple do-it-yourself solution for almost any modern phone that uses WiFi when available. Most slashdotters here probably can set up a POP or IMAP server so what you can do, is configure the phone to retrieve the mail from a dummy account on the POP3/IMAP server and at least you'll have an IP address when the thief walks into WiFi range.
Of course, having an IP address is hardly any use. However, most of the solutions offered by companies are hardly any use so you might as well save money and do it yourself.
8 of 13 people found this answer helpful. Did you?
is to be the person that steals them.
Hooray for another helpfully unhelpful slashdot comment.
. . . they got more than just the suspect's fingerprints . . they got the whole fingers!
(Scene: A guy with a bandaged hand sitting in the police interrogation room. A detective walks in and tosses a package on the table.)
"Hey, Luigi, are these your fingers?"
"Never seen them before in my life, pal!"
Schroedinger's Brexit: The UK is both in and out of the EU at the same time!
If you use a software tracking approach, thieves will learn to put tape over the webcam, and not use it until they ask someone in the black market to reinstall the operating system for a fee, or learn to reinstall operating system by themselves. This is just like how thieves learned to use the credit card immediately after they steal it before you have a chance to cancel the card.
Other approaches taken will lead to workarounds too. If you have a database of serial numbers and require legit second hand market to verify the serial number before going on sale, the thief will just keep the gadget for themselves, for their friends, or sell it in the black market. If you're able to remotely brick the device, the thief will still be able to use it for a while, and then just steal another one. I'm sure thieves don't mind using new gadgets all the times.
I once had a signature.
Have a program on it hit a server on your site for instructions, automatically. If it's ever stolen, report it stolen, then instruct it to hit known FBI child porn honeypots after erasing the program which contacts your own website. You won't get the gadget back, but you'll get to know the thief got punished way out of proportion to his crime.
The best way to find stolen electronic gadgets is on eBay... they all show up there sooner or later.
I don't read your sig. Why are you reading mine?
It all depends how sensitive the data is.
You can choose to wipe the entire system remotely if you are using the right software and yes, we all know the best approach is to encrypt the data in the first place.
You can choose to use tools to recover it if the laptop doesn't get immediately formatted by the thief. Webcam screenshot capture, video capture, desktop snapshot collection, browser history collection, audio to mp3 recording, key loggers etc can all be done silently in the background and their data can be sent up to a central server so long as the system connects to the internet (Windows or OS X, I've pieced the scripts together for most of these). Personal data can be remotely browsed and returned as well.
On my personal experience with this....Over the years a number of our customers have used our software have tracked down and recovered stolen laptops and in turn allowed the police to recover other stolen items. Currently we've got someone who is hopefully going to get a warrant to recover a laptop among other things that were simultaneously stolen (TV, WWII memorabilia including firearms) thanks to the overwhelming evidence he is able to present to the police. Another recent case I worked on was with a gentleman in Australia who recovered a stolen laptop and in turn helped the police apprehend two other suspects and recover 50+ items. Story is here: http://www.crn.com.au/News/153253,kaseya-tracks-down-stolen-laptop-in-melbourne.aspx (I am the 'tech guy' mentioned...)
Encrypt your devices and don't worry about it; just get a new device. What's with the desire to catch the thief for a device that's probably not worth more than a few hundred dollars? Besides, you were dumb enough to put your device in a position to be stolen in the first place.
If you can track it, can you ever say its been lost? So, in the name of keeping the language intact, lets drop thing tracking lost things once and for ever!
We will purposefully never reveal a location to a consumer customer," said John Livingston, chief executive of Absolute Software. The company's Computrace package ($14 to $53 a year) is marketed as "Lojack for Laptops," and is available as a preinstalled option on computers from Lenovo, Dell, HP and other manufacturers. "We won't do it. Once you declare that it's lost or stolen, we take control over the location at that point. We purposely keep some safe distance between the end user and the thief."
Let me get this straight, if I pay for Lojack and my property is stolen, you will purposefully keep information on where my property is, from me?
Looks like I will never be using your service. I say let the customer decide what course of action to take. If that customer wishes to contact the police themselves Lojack should divulge the information. Customer's property, customer pays for service, customer isn't always right?
It's true no man is an island, but if you take a bunch of dead guys and tie 'em together, they make a good raft.
Hello,
My name is Ken Westin, I am the founder of GadgetTrak ( www.gadgettrak.com ) one of the companies mentioned in the article and we provide tracking software for a range of devices including Mac, Windows, Blackberry, Windows Mobile and others. The privacy component was a critical factor in our design, looking at other solutions we saw that a lot of data including location, photos etc were being sent to the companies server, some even provide a monitoring center with a backdoor into the system. When we designed our software we did so in a way that would respect user privacy.
For example with our laptop software MacTrak and PC-Trak the only data we have is if the device tracking is active or not, the location and photos captured goes to the device owner's email address as well as Flickr account, so it goes to accounts that the owner controls and never to us. When a device is stolen we ask the customer to friend us on Flickr and share the photo and data, or they can just forward it to us. There is no reason to have this type of data come to our servers if we can avoid it. In the future we may have an option for the user to CHOOSE to upload this data to a server, but we will always provide the device owner with the control of how this data is managed.
You can read more about our philosophy here:
http://www.gadgettrak.com/products/mac/privacy/
Our mobile phone software also has the capability to remotely wipe data from the device as well as track it. The mobile phone software is triggered by SMS messages. The software has a password with it as well, so if the device is stolen the user sends and SMS message with a command and the software password to activate various functions including tracking, data wipe, trigger an alarm, lock device and others. Again this data does not go through a server, it is done between the device owner and the device itself.
We also pioneered the USB software for iPods, flash drives and other devices that was mentioned in the store and have a patent for it, all data is encrypted and transmitted securely.
We come from a security background and are extremely paranoid about privacy ourselves, this is why we made sure that no photo or location data ever touches our servers. The best way to ensure privacy of this type of information is to build the software so there is no way it can transmit it to you, remove the man in the middle altogether. We also believe that this data should be provided to you, after all it is your device you should be given the data and be able to decide what to do with it. We assist in the recovery process and work with law enforcement, however the data goes to you first. It is very much backwards from the traditional approach where the data is sent to a monitoring center where they have a back door into your system and they only share that data with law enforcement, some will refuse to provide you with this data even though it is your device.
Let me know if you have any questions, or suggestions.
Thank you
Ken Westin
GadgetTrak Founder
With Excel I can track the stolen gadgets by category and get some aggregated sales statistics too.
Set the device up so that if someone incorrectly enters the password 3 times, instead of a lockout, have it blow up. Problem solved, and you just helped reduce future crime by disabling 1 more criminal.
Simply make the device itself expendable to the owner. Create a setup where any storage media on the device can be quickly removed when not in use and implement it in a way that forces the user to practice it regularly. For example, make removing the storage itself the "on/off" switch for the device.
8==8 Bones 8==8
I like how Apple lets me track my iPhone (and even laptops to some extent) via MobileMe. The iPhone (or iPod touch) shows up on a google map on the MobileMe website, and updates live with location. /. posted a story about a man who recovered his iPhone (though he acted arguably foolishly by showing up unarmed to collect). Also noteworthy was a woman who used the Back to my Mac feature to login to her stolen laptop, access the webcam and snap and email a photo. OS X Snow Leopard is said to have location services built into the OS, we may see an expansion of the tracking services in a few months
Damnit! Do you have any idea how long it took me to figure out what you were talking about, why a termite would require an ignition source, and why anyone would want to reply to a post suggesting that somehow a termite might be useful?
It turns out spelling is important...
Slashdotters' spelling.... grumble, grumble, grumble,
Im not here now... Im out KILLING pepperoni