%%EOF If you would like to know more about us, don't hesitate to call and ask for a tour of our facility or research our websites and Social Media pages. *Correction: In the original version, we wrote that this service costs $50 per month.Absolute inventive group null co absolute inventive group null co “If the VA had had this, there would have been no problem,” says Rubin. Beachhead’s system, which starts at $129 per year, can be set to overwrite as many as eight times. The Pentagon, for instance, requires three over-writes to expunge sensitive data. Deleting a file – simply putting it into a trash can or recycle bin, is not sufficient, since the data is still on the disk. When a stolen machine reports in, it can be instructed to overwrite selected files, explains Jeff Rubin, a representative of Santa Clara, CA-based Beachhead Solutions, which offers a kill service called Lost Data Destruction. But no tracking is attempted instead, the purpose is to check whether a machine should start destroying its data files. As with Computrace, laptops equipped with kill switches report to a central server at intervals. The service starts at about $60 per machine per year.īut “kill” switches are the most dramatic – and drastic – way to foil thieves. “If you steal it, boot it, and connect it, and violate authentication, the computer operates like a honey pot, as we draw in the thief while protecting the confidential information on it,” says Lide. If someone boots the system without inputting the right password, they will be able to use the machine – but it will hide the encrypted partition from the user while sending alerts to the tracking service.
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Their software creates an encrypted partition on the hard drive, says spokesperson Bradley Lide. One firm licensing Absolute’s software, CyberAngel Security Solutions in Nashville, TN, combines tracking with an encryption scheme. Nevertheless, since tracked machines remain in the hands of thieves until they’re recovered, another security measure may also be useful: encryption. Absolute Software has placed the instructions for contacting Computrace into the basic input-output system (BIOS) of recent Hewlett-Packard, Gateway, Lenovo, Dell, and Fujitsu laptops, so that even reinstalling the operating system will not stop the machines from reporting in, Jickling says. A thief would be safe if he kept the stolen laptop off line – but that rarely happens, especially now that Wi-Fi networks have sprouted in every apartment building and corner café. Some 80 percent of stolen or wayward laptops protected by Computrace are recovered, according to Jickling. A boxed consumer version of Computrace, called “Lojack for Laptops” (after the car-tracking device), costs $49.99 per year. At that price, Gomes figures the service will pay for itself if it prevents ten $2,000 machines from disappearing. The Computrace service costs about $50 per year* per machine. Their eyes kind of open, and they bring it back right away.” “Now I let them know that I can track them. “Before, we had a huge rate of people dropping out of the program and not bringing their laptops back,” Gomes recalled. The tracking system also helps keep students honest. In fact, a week after William Penn signed up for the Computrace tracking system, a laptop stolen out of a car was recovered by police five days later.
And if the missing machine’s Internet address can be pinned down to a street address, police will soon show up there, according to company spokesman Les Jickling. If the computer is reported stolen, the server will instruct it to start sending messages every 15 minutes. Instead, Gomes decided to try laptop tracking – a technique that’s been around for a decade, but recently has seen sales growth of 50 percent per year.Įach machine subscribed to the Computrace service typically reports to a company server once a day via the Internet. The university decided it had become uneconomical to try to hunt down each machine manually. William Penn University in Oskaloosa, IA, turned to the system this year, after about 500 laptops in one of its colleges went missing, says Curt Gomes, the university’s IT supervisor. One solution, then, is a tracking system, such as Computrace, run by Absolute Software of Vancouver, Canada.
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