Following on from my post yesterday about
miscreants being photographed by the laptop they had stolen, I had an email this morning from Bart Frederix at Swift who brought
Undercover to my attention. This claims you can recover your stolen machine anywhere in the universe. Ahem. Universe?
If reported as stolen it basically phones home and transmits network details, screenshots (so you can attempt to work out who the baddies are and what they're doing) and for good measure sends snaphots from the built in camera every six minutes. Presumably
it disables the little camera-on LED while it's snapping away too.
If all this fails to get it rescued, after a time it reverts to plan B and simulates a hardware failure forcing the thief to either flog it or get it repaired - at which point the idea is it gets discovered. Hey - why not have a plan C - disable the cooling
fan and make it overheat and singe the baddies fingers?
And of course if you set a firmware password it'll stop the disk being reformatted by the baddies so they can't reformat it.
Sounds rather useful - at least for Mac owners anyway. There's some interesting stuff here too
on The Register from last year in a similar vein.
As for me - well - I take the obvious precautions:
- set a firmware (or BIOS) password
- disable "auto login" so if the machine is rebooted you need a password to get in
- don't take it to the pub
- don't carry it in an obvious laptop bag
So - I wonder what measures community folk out there take to protect their laptops? Do tell!